Iain Banks - A Song Of Stone

A hawk, I do believe. One of mine I let fly out, come back. I gaze up, submitting for a moment to an easy admiration of the beast, imagining that it knows somehow that I am here and you are not and all is lost, that some honed slayer's instinct brings it back to acknowledge all our fates.

But it is just a bird, and stupid in our terms; its delicately fierce frame, that narrow pared skull, holds just sufficient sense for its carnivorous function, and contains no room for any further thought. Carved to fit its place in life through the struggles of all its ancestors, sculpted by the vast simplicity of evolution it has no more sense of our tribulations than does a knife, or a bullet, and is just as blameless. What we call its cruel beauty appeals to our found sense of awe, but it is our pride, our ferocity and our grace that we deify in it, and at our peril think at all which we put below the talon's crude mechanic grasp, and precisely by our reckoning it is we who remain forever above it.

I hear the sound of other guns, that great rumble rolling over the land from some distant front, somehow surprising me, forcing the unknowing world back upon my consciousness, as I stand here; bound, condemned and waiting.

The soldiers say they will move on tomorrow. They shooed the refugees away to take over their mean camp upon the lawns, and now a couple of husbands and one of our servants float in the moat too. You, forever silent one, are still raised up within the clearing air, poised blackened over the collapsed and gutted shell of the castle, your composed eyes at last observing dryly what the air now offers you, and I wonder will the hawk, preferring cooked or undone meat, visit you or I.

For I too am tied, in Mezentian hyperbole, made a toy. a puppet of before the cannon's mouth. They tied me here by arms and legs and body, the artillery piece's broad muzzle in the small of my back a larger, more potent gun, where there was a smaller one fixing me like a sacrifice from an airy altar rifled, crossbowed like an unknown quantity, a wrong answer, a kiss at the bottom of a page, like a mill's limbs, indeed, but unrevolving. I have been more comfortable, it is true, but I can lean back on the steel tube of the gun to take the weight off my splayed legs. My arms, pulled back by the ropes, have gone numb and so at least no longer hurt, and the men threw a blanket and a coat over me, so I should not die too soon. I was even fed some bread and a little wine.

All my attempts at playing the man of action, the lieutenant's murder and the responsibility for yours, secured me just one more day of life, and cost us everything. Their intention, at the next day's light, is to raise me to the skies, elevate me, spread over the gun's great snout, set a charge but no shell in the breach and then throw dice for which one gets to pull the firing lanyard.

I made my pleas, I tried to reason, to appeal somehow, but they see a fitness in my death, I think, that is not entirely predicated upon their admittedly correct conviction that it was I who killed the lieutenant. My pleas were too eloquent, perhaps, my attempt to use reason doomed from the start, and as for my try at appealing to them man to man as a chap unjustly accused, a chum, a mate in trouble that was, apparently, just laughable (for certainly they laughed).

Still, for all my fear felt in the guts that will bear the brunt of my release I think I can still savour the fact that my life ends with a blank, and see the possibilities for touches the soldiers might not appreciate. And so I want the hawk to come down and peck some living part of me, or the soldiers to raise me up now, place an old tin helmet on my head, sponge some water into my mouth and stick a bayonet in my side… But I am anyway between these thieves, and a calm eye in the circle of their vehicles, something they have already grown bored with. The hawk settles on you, my dear. I try to watch it perch and pull and pluck and tear with a disinterested eye, but find the exercise impossible, and have to look away, at the bare trees and the dark tents and the remainder of the lieutenant's men.

They are busy finishing off the castle's last reserves, consuming its food and wine or busy with the women they decided to keep from the camp. Tomorrow they may fire a few more rounds back at some hazy westward front, and then retreat, but perhaps not.

There have been arguments. They seem uncertain, now. Some want to abandon the gun entirely, thinking it might slow them down, complaining that they have nothing they particularly want to target. Others want to offer their services to a larger concern, or find some other shelter, citadel or town which they can threaten with the gun, and so be paid for sparing.

I do not understand their war, nor know now who fights whom for what or why. This could be any place or time, and any cause could bring the same results, the same ends, loose or met, or won or lost.

I look around their appropriated camp and see them, quiet or snoring, stoking a fire, smoking the lieutenant's dry cigarettes, guzzling their booty, checking their weapons or with their women.

“I am too tolerant, I suspect, for the truth is that I feel sorry for these brutes. They kill me now but they'll die later, writhing on the blood muddied ground with no lieutenant there to kiss them and then swiftly dispatch; or they'll live limbless, institutionalised, with a ghost of pain forever haunting the abbreviated memory of flesh, or carry the wounds deeper still, in the abyssal darkness of the mind, and toss tormented by the dreams of death decades hence, alone in their sleep no matter who lies by their side, transported by the recollecting claws of that embedded horror back to a time they thought they'd lived through and escaped, forever dragged back and down.

It is my estimation that, unless one's involvement is peripheral, nobody survives a war; the people who come out the other side are not those who went in. Oh, I know, we all change, every day, and each morning emerge from our cocoon of sleep a different person, to confront an unutterably alien face, and any illness, and all shocks, age and change us by their given degrees… yet when the illness is past or the shock faded, we rejoin, more or less, the same society that we left, and recalibrate our selves by it. Such triangulating solace is denied us when that community itself has changed as much as or more than we have ourselves, and we must remake our own beings as well as the fabric of that shared world.

And the soldier, giving up his place in the braided stream of citizenry to be disposed into martial rank and file, surrenders more than any to the vagaries of that turmoil. The refugees, collectivised by misery and mischance, take their lives with them when they move, with some practical, if also partial hope of later resurrection; when soldiers take the lives of others, and have theirs taken, they go to their cold ends not to be commended or condemned, or contemplate a life so stamped with error, but merely to embrace the empty truth of the mind's obliteration.

Dear lieutenant, I think we all seduced you, deflected you from a course that might have let you live. Seeking something in the quick of us, searching to secure a kind of love with the provenance of age and land and family, you took over our premises; you presumed to the legacy that was ours, and if you did not see that such assumptions have their own ramifying repercussions, and that the stones demand their own continuity of blood, if you did not understand the gravity of their isolation, the solitude of their trapped state or the hardness of their old responsibility, still you cannot fault the castle or either one of us, or complain that you were led to your own conclusion.

I left the castle; you brought us all back.

The night comes deeper on them and they shelter, in their tents and trucks, closer to me. My body aches from far away, displaced by time and cold. I still believe the hawk will come and be my deliverance, pecking out my eyes in some final unmeant extension of “torment, or perhaps instead it will deliver me, stabbing at my bonds, fraying the ropes, freeing me from the ties that bind me so that I might have one final attempt of my own at flight.