Iain Banks - A Song Of Stone

Across the other side of the courtyard, just visible beyond the captured gun, a soldier comes out of the main door. I go still. He peers at me, then goes back in and reappears suddenly with a rifle, levelling it at me from the shelter of the doorway. It does not even occur to me to shoot at him with the pistol I am holding. Instead I duck, turn and run; the rifle shot kicks stone chips off the passageway wall as I sprint out across the bridge. The truck is coming up the drive, lights blazing. Somebody, leans out of one window, sighting on me. I hear another shot.

I try the door of the parked truck, but it is locked. I run across the gravel path to the slope of grass that drops to the moat, thinking to use the bank as cover, but the grass is too wet; I make only a few steps along the slope before I slip and slide down the grass. I fall into the moat, splashing and struggling, gasping in that icy grip, trying to find some footing in the steep underwater slope beneath, still holding the pistol and with my other hand attempting to grab the grass and soil to pull myself out.

The water kicks and splashes by me; I turn, back against the grassy bank, and look up. A soldier is leaning over the battlements above, pointing a gun down at me. He waves, calls something out. I steady myself as best I can and take aim; the pistol punches back at me; once, twice, then stops. Flakes of stone puff out from the top of the wall. I pull the trigger a few more times, then throw the useless gun away. The soldier has disappeared, but now he comes back; peeking, then leaning over the parapet and shouting something down. I turn my back, and with both hands start to haul myself out of the moat, waiting all the time for the shot, the awful crashing mallet kick of a bullet hitting. Instead, there is only laughter.

Scrambling slowly, helplessly awkward in my water weighted clothes, I pull and kick my way out of the water and up the bank. A bottle sails down, thuds off the grass nearby and plops into the moat behind. I reach the gravel path and stand, swaying and looking up at the battlements. The soldier there waves again. The two trucks are parked together now. A few of the soldiers are lowering something from the rear of the truck that's just returned; some are standing watching me. Another bottle sails out from the battlements, arcing down to shatter on the gravel near my feet. One of the soldiers at the trucks starts walking towards me, making a beckoning motion with his rifle. I run for the trees.

Then as I run across the lawn I hear a shout, and look back to see the soldier returning to the truck. The soldiers do not follow me, or shoot at me. They troop into the castle.

I squat in the bushes, shivering, my body aching with cold. I shake uncontrollably, trying to believe I shall ever be warm again. On the battlements, a drunken soldier waves a bottle at me, then looks behind and walks away. I look down, on all fours, panting like a frustrated lover at the unresponsive ground, my breath blown back at me. Even this pathetic posture cannot be maintained, my arms and legs both giving way; I have to curl up on my side, quivering in the bushes like a shocked and wounded animal.

I had thought I had been quite dashing enough, but the castle fails me. I am locked out, the soldiers, whether they know it was I who killed their lieutenant or not, seem unconcerned with me, not judging me worth the effort of pursuit. And you, my dear, you are nowhere to be seen. The pistol was no use; two pointless shots, then nothing. And what good could I have done with the thing in any event? Crutch, gravestone, pipe, club, spear; guns have many uses, multifarious effects. Perhaps they alter minds as well as anatomies; perhaps their ejected issuings get under the skin in more ways than one. Do they determine more than those who fire them? Do their unmuzzled mouths really speak so loud, their barrels overflow with death and mutilation with such effect that they speak louder than we, who, recoiling from their use, cannot see that more damage is done behind them than before?

But the lieutenant

But the lieutenant is dead, and so no good example. Did I kill her by being different, or the same? It hardly matters, and anyway I threw the gun away.

Now I hear more shouts from the castle. I rise to my knees, still unable to stand. The cold seems to penetrate to my bowels; I do not think I can run away. Guns fire, but only into the air.

They stand behind the battlements; nearly all her men, and some of the women from the camp as well. The grey folds of rain descend between us, but I can see it all; the chipped stones. the waving, saturated skin, the holed roof, and that line of illmatched men and women, most drunk and swaying, some of them waving, some smiling, some shouting, some firing their guns into the air.

They have you both. Until this moment there was some part of my mind that wanted to believe that the lieutenant did not really die, that she extricated herself before the wind set the millstones moving, that a soldier I hadn't noticed made it to the mill before those arms sailed round, that some unclutching in the mill's mechanism had let the sails move while the stones stayed still. That same desperate site of hope within my mind deluded itself with dreams of you having stolen away from the castle already, not sanguine about my fate as you seemed at all, but secretly appalled at what you knew the lieutenant intended. for me and determined to make your escape from the castle and her control.

Fantasies, my dear, and me all the more pitiful for imagining that not thinking such thoughts openly would somehow give them a better chance of reflecting the actuality of our circumstances. Instead, there stands the lieutenant, her headless body supported by a couple of her men. Somebody behind her puts a cap or beret on what's left of her neck. I think some of the men are laughing.

Two of the soldiers force you quiet, expression blank up to teeter on the rampart stones, your hair soaked blackly to your white nightdress. The nightdress clings skinlike in the soaking rain, and you stand there, arms held behind you, staring out, at once waif and voluptuary.

They pull you back down; I see the nightdress thrown up over your head as they force you back against the parapet, your head between two of the stones. There is some shouting and jeering. I find myself biting my lip, only realising that I am doing so when the blood is sucked back into my mouth.

I do not think you afford the soldiers much sport, or perhaps their women prevail on most of them; at any rate, within a few minutes you are lifted back up to the parapet again, expression still unreadable. I think I see a trickle of blood on your chin, too. They are tying your arms behind your back; a length of bandage trails slackly from your right forearm. I believe I see you shiver.

The men are shouting and yelling, calling on me to come out. I try to rise, but then fall back, paralysed by the cold and the realisation of my own wretched helplessness.

The lieutenant's body is anointed with some wine, then pushed over the edge of the parapet; it falls, somersaulting slackly and splashes out of sight. You stand, my dear, helpless as I, your eyes as empty as my mind is of ideas that might save us. Some refugees men, old women and children come round from the front of the castle, hesitant, uncertain, but drawn by the calls and laughter and harmless fire and the sound of the young women on the battlements joining in. Most gather on the gravel path, though some hang further back, still fearful. I watch the men at the battlements, I watch the castle, its skin flag flapping, I watch the rain, and a dark bird that circles, high above, and which may be one of mine, a freed raptor returned at last.

Only you I cannot watch; that awful blankness drives my sight away, forces down or up or to the side my feeble gaze. That face has been my vanity's mirror; on it you have let me write anything I have ever wanted to write, shown me anything I have ever wanted to see. Now, like the blind spot in the eye that lets us see at all, it is the one place I cannot look, the one sight I cannot bring myself to take in.