Iain Banks - A Song Of Stone

Not here. Not here. Did you really say that? Is that what I truly heard? The words echo in my head. Not here. Not here…

So cold, my dear. The words, the meaning so matter of fact, so pragmatic sounding. Did you too think I came like some covetous swain in a bitter rage to kill the two of you? Has our shared life not taught you what and who I am? Have all our judicious indiscretions, our widespread pleasurings and reciprocated liberties not convinced you of my lack of jealousy by now?

Oh, that I should have injured you, that even now you nurse that wound, however minor, at your breast, thinking that I meant it, and worse. That is what hurts, what injures me. I wish I could take and suffer the wound I so carelessly inflicted. My hands clench, beneath the stiff tarpaulin. It would seem that my hands have become my eyes, and my heart; for they both weep, and ache.

The steel floor beneath me hums and judders, the tarpaulin ripples and beats, one flapping corner continually tapping me on the shoulder like some manic boor trying to attract my attention. The noise of air rushes all around, eddying and reverberating, tearing and roaring, ferocious in its meaningless intensity and creating a calm more determined than mere stillness could have pretended to. My head buzzes, infected with all this resounding emptiness.

My right hand lies near my forehead; I find the control to move it closer, and the tarpaulin shields the movement. I touch my temple, feeling wetness, the pain of raw, scored flesh; a long, still slowly bleeding wound in a crease, a ridge along the side of my head, extending from near my eye to past my ear. The blood drops from my brow. I catch a few drops and rub it between my fingers, thinking of my father.

What a sorry race we are, what sad ends we continue to contrive for all our selves. No harm meant, my dear, yet so much damage done. To you, to us, and to me, already harmed but about to be put beyond further harming. Should I go so uncomplaining to my end? I'm not sure I really have much choice.

We are all our own partisans, we are every one, when pressed, combatant, our clothes our armour, softly encasing our unsteady frames, our flesh the mortal fabric most suited to the fray. To the last man, at least, we are soldiers, and yet there are those who even in the face of death never discover the animating savagery such martial revelation demands, their particular character requiring a combination of circumstance and motive the situation has not produced. The merely cunning tyrant preys upon the tolerant intelligence of those better than they. Armies by brutality forge the brotherhood amongst their troops they should extend to all, then turn one against the other. Does our lieutenant do something similar to me? Does she have me in her spell, too? Would I have acted otherwise had she been a man? And am I to discover at my death a capacity for willing suffering, and a fatalism, I never guessed at in my life?

Perhaps the descent from property and polity to this rude cess of rule. by gun has so abraded my sense of worth that I can envisage my surrender to its liquidating processes with relative equanimity; a hanging leaf that feels the storm's breath and happily lets go. I think now I may have been shortsighted not to have realised that though we live in periods of peace, they are as much the store of just their opposite as accumulated wealth, two faced, implies impoverishment in its gift. We are the only animal naturally perverse; it ought not to come as a surprise to me that this applies as much in greater matters as it does in more intimate situations. We draw up rules for relations between systems, states and faiths, and for those between our selves, but they are written on the passing wave, and however much we dodge and gloss and wheel and skim and are adroitly gauche with our modifications, justifications and epicyclic excuses, by our own trammels we're caught at last, and tangled in our lines fall back to others, no better prepared.

Some part of me, resentful and frustrated at such forbearance, would lie here in sly deceit, gathering my strength, collecting my resources and then leaping up, startling and surprising them all, seizing a gun and turning the tables, bending them to my will, forcing them to accept my authority and take the direction I desire.

But this is not me. I am still lost within my body, communications with the useful parts still patchy, my legs twitching, hands clenched involuntary, head and ribs hurting, mouth working but only to dribble; if I tried to leap I might do no more than jerk, or even if I did leap up a child could knock me down, and should I try to grab a gun probably I'd miss, or be defeated by the button on a holster.

And even if I were well and whole and in the best of spirits I doubt I could assume the lieutenant's mantle so. These soldiers know what they want to do, they have a mission and a course, they are within their natural environment, however much they may resent it, however they may yearn for resumed civilian roles. But that civility is the only place I know where I can be by myself, the sole state that I can understand and that makes sense not just to me, but of me.

I would like to return to you, my dear, and to our castle, and then be free to stay or go according to our desire, that is all. But would leaping up, taking a gun in the unlikely event that I could taking charge (just so), accomplish this> Could I kill them all, return and rescue you? Kill the lieutenant, your new lover, kill the others? I believe Mr Cuts is in the jeep too, and Karma, though I'm no more sure that they are than if they are how I know.

Too much impoderable. Too much to think on.

I might leap up and escape, perhaps, somehow avoid their shots and then be allowed to go, not worth the effort of pursuit. But to head here? Can I abandon you, abandon the castle? You two are my context and my society, in both of you I find and define myself. Though both may be taken, one despoiled for ever, one beguiled for the moment, still I have no real existence without you.

There is no recourse for me. The choices that have led to this conclusion lie too far back down the track, or up the stream our view of it itself a choice to make any difference now. If I had always been a man of action, or if I had not loved you so, or been less inquisitive, or if I had loved the castle less and quit when the quitting was easier or loved it a little more, so that I was prepared to die there rather than hope to flee and eventually return then I might not lie here now. Perhaps if I had been less fixed on you and on the castle, and you on me, and we had been more conventionally social creatures, less prideful in our refusal to hide what our feelings for each other were, things would have been different too.

For prideful, scornful we have been, have we not, my dear? Had we been more prudent, less disdainful, had we hidden our contempt for the trite morality of the herd and concealed our activities, we might have kept the wider pool of friends, acquaintances and contacts that gradually dried up around us as the knowledge of our intimacy spread. It was not even just that awareness that gradually isolated us, it was rather the undeniability of that perception, for people will tolerate much in others, especially those others whose esteem is judged worth the winning, but only if the possessors of that knowledge can credibly pretend to themselves and others that they do not know what they really do.

That cosy self delusion was not enough for us, however; it seemed part and parcel of the same outmoded morality we had already twice denied, through our own close but prohibited union and the wider compass of hardly less scandalous liaisons we partook in and encouraged. And so, in our vanity, having found stimulation in these earlier scandals and desirous of new ways to shock, perhaps, we made it too difficult for those around us with any regard for popular judgement to deny what we were and what we did.