Iain Banks - A Song Of Stone

“This is her fault, hers!” Mother wailed, pointing at you. You looked at her blankly and played with the hem of your dress.

“Don't be stupid!” Father told her. “It's your responsibility; why isn't the well cover locked?”

A terrific thrill ran through me then; I experienced a sensation I would only later be able to identify as something close to sexual, orgasmic, as I watched on while others fretted, laboured, panicked and performed for me. My bladder threatened to embarrass me and I had to clench my stomach around a ball of joy at the same time as I crossed my legs and pinched my still hairless manhood to prevent a further wetting of my pants.

Some other servants and Father's mistress appeared, crowding around the well as Arthur brought the empty bucket to the surface. My mother's wails filled the courtyard. “A torch!” my father shouted. “Fetch me a torch!” A servant ran back into the castle. The bucket was perched on the wall, dripping. Father tested the rope. “Someone may have to go down there,” he declared. “Who's the lightest?”

I was bowed in the shadows, still trying not to wet myself. A fire of fierce elation filled me, threatening to burst.

Then I saw the line of drips I'd left, from well to where I now stood. I looked in horror at the spots, dark coins of dirty well water fallen from my soaking clothes on to the dry grey cobbles; two or three for every pace or so. At my feet, in the darkness, the water had formed a little pool. I looked back into the courtyard, to where an even greater crowd had assembled, almost obscuring Father, who was now shining a flashlight down into the well and instructing servants to hold up jackets over his head so that the day's brightness would not dazzle him while he peered into the gloom.

The drops I had left shone in the sunlight. I could not believe that nobody had seen them. Mother was screaming hysterically now; a sharp, jarring noise that I had never heard from her or from anyone else before. It shook my soul, suffused my conscience. What was I to do? I had had my revenge on you though you'd seemed only a little worried, I'd noticed and you had already been partially blamed, but where did I go from here? This had quickly become more serious than I'd anticipated, escalating with dizzying rapidity from a great prank born of a brilliant brainwave to something that I could tell, just from the number and seniority of adults losing their composure would not be put to rest without some serious, painful and lasting punishment being inflicted on somebody, almost certainly myself. I cursed myself for not thinking this through. From crafty plan, to downfall, to wheeze, to calamity; all in a few minutes.

The plan came to me like a lifebelt to a drowning man. I gathered all my courage and left my hiding place in the passageway shadows, coming staggering out and blinking. I cried out faintly, one hand to my brow, then yelled out a little louder when my first cry went unheeded. Somebody turned, then all did; shouts and exclamations went up. I stumbled on a little further as people rushed towards me, then collapsed dramatically on the cobbles just before they got to me.

Sitting up, comforted, my head in my weeping mother's,bosom, my hands held and rubbed by separate servants, I went “Phew” and said “Oh dear” and smiled bravely and claimed that I had found a secret tunnel from the bottom of the well to the moat, and crawled and swum along it until I got out, climbed up the bridge and tottered, exhausted, through the passageway.

To this day I think I was almost getting away with it until Father appeared squatting in front of me, his expression dark, his eyes stony. He had me repeat my story. I did so, hesitating, no longer quite so sure of myself. Had I said I'd climbed out via the bank? I meant the bridge. His eyes narrowed. Thinking I was plugging a gap, in fact only adding another log to my pyre, I said that the secret passage had fallen in after me; there wouldn't be any point in, say, sending somebody down to look for it. In fact the whole well was dangerous. I'd barely escaped with my life.

Looking into my father's eyes was like looking into a dark tunnel with no stars at the end. It was as though he was seeing me for the first time, and as though I was looking down a secret passage through time, to an adult perspective, to the way the world and cocky, lying children's stories would look to me when I was his age.

My words died in my throat.

He reached out and slapped me, hard, across the face. “Don't he ridiculous, boy,” he said, investing more contempt in those few words than I'd have thought a whole language capable of conveying. He rose smoothly to his feet and walked away.

Mother wailed, screaming incoherently at him. Servants looked confused, some gazing at me with troubled expressions, some looking after him as he walked back into the castle. His mistress followed, taking you by the hand.

Arthur, whom I thought old then but who was not really, looked down from the space in the crowd Father's exit had created, his expression regretful and troubled, shaking his head or looking like he wanted to, not because I had had a terrifying adventure and then been unjustly disbelieved and harshly struck by my own father, but because he too could see through my forlorn and hapless lie, and worried for the soul, the character, the future moral standing of any child so shameless and so incompetent ~ in its too easily resorted to lying. In that pity was a rebuke as severe and wounding as that my father had administered with his twin handfuls of fingers and words, and in as much that it confirmed that this was the mature judgement of my actions and my father's, not some aberration I might be able to discount or ignore, it affected me even more profoundly.

I began to cry. And began to cry not with the shallow, hot and easy tears of childish frustration and rage, but with my first real adult anguish, with a grief by myself deflowered of petty childhood concern; great sobbing heartfelt tears of sorrow not no* just selfishly for my own narrow sense of advantage or annoyance, because I'd been found out or because I knew some protracted punishment probably awaited, though there was that too but for my father's lost belief and pride in his only son.

That was what racked me, spread upon the castle's stones; that was what gripped me like a cold fist inside and squeezed those cold and bitter tears of grief from me and could not be comforted by Mother's soothing strokes and gentle pats and soft cooings.

Later, Mother still declared that she believed my story, though I suspect that she only said so to deny my father his last convert, to frustrate his will; another spurious victory in the decades long campaign they waged against each other, at first mutually besieging and betraying in the castle, later apart. She agreed I needed to be punished, though to save face she asserted it was for going down the well in the first place. (My claim that I'd fallen somehow, that even my original descent had all been an accident had been contradicted by you, my dear, revealing an unfortunate respect for the truth.)

And so I was sent to my room for the first night of many, with nothing but school books for company and a prisoner's rations.My exile brought one incalculable benefit, one utterly unlooked for bonus which would, years later, maturing, consolidated.

You came to my room, having persuaded a servant to you in with a pass key, so that you might apologise for what you said was your part in my offence. You brought a little pink cake you'd taken from the kitchens and hidden in your

You knelt by my bed. A single bedside lamp lit my tear swollen cheeks and your wide, dark eyes. You handed me the small cake two handed, with a near comical reverence. I took it a nodded, eating half of it in one munching gulp, then popping the rest into my mouth.