Iain Banks: A Song Of Stone

The lieutenant gives orders I do not hear to the men in the trucks, then swings into the jeep, taking the wheel herself. The fellow sitting in the passenger seat holds a drainpipe diameter olive tube about a metre and a half long. I take it to be a rocket launcher. I am squeezed in the back between the metal post supporting the machine gun and a fat, pale soldier who smells like a week dead fox. Behind us, sitting on the rear lip of the vehicle, crouches a fourth soldier who holds the heavy machinegun.

We take the narrow forest track, round the back of the old estate, beneath the small escarpment fringed with dripping evergreens. The overhanging trees and bushes in places form a tunnel around the track, and the soldier manning the machinegun curses quietly, ducking as snagging branches try to wrest the gun from his grip. The track approaches the stream that feeds the moat. The bridge is rotten, too frail for the jeep, timbers skewed and loose. The lieutenant turns to me, a look of disappointment beginning to form on her face.

“We're close now,” I tell her, keeping my voice low. I nod. “Just over the ridge; there's a clear view.”

She follows my gaze, then says quietly to the soldier at the machine gun, “Karma, take the gun. Let's go.”

It would seem I am included. We leave the jeep unmanned and the five of us the lieutenant and I, the man with the rocket launcher, the fat, pale soldier and the one she called Karma, who totes the jeep's machine gun and several heavy looking loops of belted ammunition cross the bridge and scale the steep bank on the far side. From the top, through bushes, the castle and the nearer gardens are spread out. It is a fine vantage point. The lieutenant takes out a pair of small fieldglasses, training them on our home.

A brief shower comes upon us, the falling drops catching in one last slant of sunlight levered underneath the rain clouds billowing down from the north. I look at my home, as a golden shroud of wind and rain wraps round it, trying to see it as another might; a modest castellation, not large; age smoothed, sitting prettily in a ring of water and surrounded by lawns, hedges, gravel paths and outbuildings. The ancient walls once pierced only by arrow slots, long since remodelled to allow more generous windows are the colour of honey, in that rose red light. It looks peaceful; but still, for all that architectural delicacy, somehow too strong for these brutal, disrespecting times.

Steeped in all this indiscriminate barbarity, anything standing proud invites a razing, like some defiant shout which only draws the hands” attention still faster to the throat, to grasp that moving strand of air by which we hang from and on to life. The only persistence in these unleashed days is achieved through low denominations and banality; in uniformity if not in uniforms, like that shoal of the displaced we tried to become part of. Sometimes the lowest how is the highest guard to offer.

For now, all is still about the castle; no smoke rises, no figures stalk its square of battlements; no flag flies above, no light shines and nothing moves. There are still a few tents on the front lawns; people from the village who'd suffered the attentions of armed bands before and had thought the proximity of the castle might guarantee a degree of safety. Some smoke rises slowly there.

I think the castle never looked so good to me as now, for all that one lot of pirates are in charge of it and I am being forced to help another band even more determined to have it for their own.

The grounds around it are another matter; even before the despoilings inflicted by our mongrel dispossessed cutting wood for fires, digging latrines in our lawns the fields, woods and policies were running down, going to seed, becoming neglected. We lost our estate manager two years ago, and I only ever distantly interested in the running of the estate could not find it in me to take his place. Thereafter, gradually, all the other estate workers were taken by the war, one way or the other, and nature, unrestrained, began to renew its old authority over the burden of our lands.

“There, at the stables,” the lieutenant whispers, over the noise of raindrops pattering through the foliage around us. “Those two four wheel drives.”

“Ours,” I tell her. We left them there, and the stable doors unlocked, knowing that to attempt to secure anything would only invite more damage. “Although we didn't leave the doors open like that.”

“That building with the slatted sides at the back of the garages,” the lieutenant says. “Is that a generator house?”

“Yes.”

“Any fuel for it?” She looks at me hopefully.

Only under our carriage. “The tank ran dry last month,” I tell her, truthfully enough. Saving our last few drums of diesel, we have mostly used candles for light and open fires for heating since then; the kitchen stoves burn wood too. There were fires and lamps that ran off propane, but we used up the final cylinder last night, before we left.

“Hmm,” our lieutenant says, as the soldier to her other side nudges her and points. We watch as a man another irregular, as far as I can see appears from the stable block, puts a drum in the back of one of the four wheel drives and then starts it, bringing it round to the front of the castle, out of sight from us.

“Much fuel in those cars?” the lieutenant asks quietly.

“Only what we couldn't siphon,” I reply.

“Can you take a vehicle into the castle itself?”

“Not one of those,” I tell her. “Too tall. There's a small courtyard, with enough room to rum something the size of a jeep around.”

“No drawbridge?” she says, looking at me. I shake my head. She smiles thinly. “I think you mentioned a gate, though, didn't you, Abel?”

“A thin one, and a portcullis of wrought iron. I doubt either would stop “

The lieutenant's radio chirps. She holds up one hand to me, and answers the radio, listening then making a snuffing noise. “Yes, if you can do it cleanly. We're on the ridge just behind the castle.”

She puts the instrument away. “Amateurs,” she says, sneering, and shakes her head. “They've nobody in the gatehouse.” She looks at the man to her other side. “Psycho's in the trees by the drive, over there,” she tells him. “Says there's only two loading the car. Nothing heavy in sight. He's about to start shooting, then one of the trucks and the other jeep are going to make a dash for the front. Give them cover.” She turns to me. “These aren't soldiers,” she says with seeming disgust, “they're just looters.” She shakes her head, then puts the binoculars away and readies her long gun, steadying it and sighting. “Deathwish,” she says to the soldier with the rocket launcher. “Save it. Not unless I tell you, okay?”

The fellow looks disappointed.

Gunfire comes from beyond the castle, near where the driveway leaves the trees and climbs up the shallow slope to the main lawn. There is nothing to see for a moment, then the four wheel drive reappears racing round the gravel track from the front of the castle, back towards the stable block. The car drifts across the gravel, rear door swinging wildly, still open. Its windscreen is starred white and somebody is trying to punch through it from behind. The lieutenant's gun barks suddenly, making me start; the heavy machine gun they brought from the jeep opens up and I put my hands to my ears. The four wheel drive shakes, pieces fly off it and it turns sharply, front wheel seeming to buckle, almost tipping it into the moat (the machine gun's rounds kick tall thin splashes in the water for a moment); the car swerves the other way, losing speed; it straightens out briefly and crashes into the corner of the stable block.

“Stop!” shouts our lieutenant, and the firing ceases.