Iain Banks: A Song Of Stone

inside, shall we?” She takes up the tray. “It's getting cold out here, and it looks like rain.”

Above us, as we troop inside, a young man calls out for his mother.

The lieutenant tethers us in a wing, so that we may fly no more. We dine behind locked doors, on bread and salted meats. in the great hall, our captor entertains her troops with all our roaring kitchens can provide. Predictably, they shot the peacocks. I expected a night of wild debauchery from our new guests, but the lieutenant according to the whispers of our servants, as they come, escorted, to deliver and remove our meal has ordered a double guard, no more than one bottle of wine per man, and decreed that our staff and those camping on the lawns be left unmolested. She is wary of attack on this first night, perhaps, and besides her men are weary, with no strength for celebration, only tired relief.

Fires burn in grates, candies flicker before mirrors on manybranched candelabra, and garden torches, unearthed from an outbuilding, burn smokily on walls or stuck in vases, a graceless caricature of medievality.

Meanwhile our looters their lives negated by a knot, and by that length shortened swing in the air from towers, stranded in the evening air as a grim signal to the outside world; perhaps the good lieutenant hopes that their swaying will so sway others. To keep them company, the lieutenant and her men have raised a fitting standard on the flagpole; a little joke, they say. It is the skin of a long dead carnivore they've found; stalked down some long neglected corridor, hunted out within a dusty storeroom then finally cornered inside a creaking trunk. And so the old snow tiger skin flies in the rain troubled air.

Later, fuelled by their banquet, the lieutenant takes her most trusted men and goes down to those scarred plains we left, to search for what booty, materiel or men she can, far into a torch lit night.

The castle has a full reserve of memories, their living on a special sort of death. The lieutenant stalks the night black plains, the men she left here fall one by one asleep, our servants clean and gather what they can then retire to their quarters, and you, on a chaise with rugs, sleep fitful before a dying logfire. I cannot sleep; instead I pace the three rooms and two short corridors we've been restricted to, carrying a small tricerion to light my way, restless and unsure, and looking from moat to courtyard. On one side there is a moon, half veiled by ragged clouds, shining on the damp sheen of forested hills where mist is gathering. On the other side I see the fitful flicker of a spitting garden torch reflecting on the stone surrounded cobbles and the well. Even as I watch, that last torch splutters and goes out.

I saw so many dances here. Each ball brought every one of note from counties upon counties away; from each great house, from each plump farm, from over the wooded hills around and across that fertile plain they came, like iron filings to a magnet drawn: sclerotic grandees, rod backed matrons, amiable buffoons ruddily ho hoing, indulgent city relations down for a little country air or to kill for sport or find a spouse, beaming boys with faces polished as their shoes, cynical graduates come to sneer and feast, poised observers of the social scene cutting their drinks with their barbed remarks, dough fresh country youths with invitations clutched, new blossomed maidens half embarrassed, half proud of their emergent allure; politicians, priests and the brave fighting men; the old money, the new money, the once monied, the titled and the expleted, the fawnshy and just the fawning, the well matured and the spoiled… the castle had room for all of them.

The great hall resounded like a skull, abuzz with wheeling thoughts, dissimilar and same. The patterns of their music took them, held them, there in its gloved hand, at once fused and confused, and scattered them about the brighter hallways, their laughter like the music for a dream.

The halls and rooms are empty now; the balconies and battlements hang dim, like handholds in the voided dark. In the darkness, in the face of memory, the castle seems now inhuman. Blocked windows mock with the view they no longer afford; here there is a stair's stone spiral disappearing into a blank ceiling where an old tower was levelled, long ago, and here cramped rooms open randomly off one another, implying a passageway, centuries abandoned and reshaped, an appendix within the castle's bowels.

I sit in a tall open window overlooking the moat, watching rising tide of mist flow up and round to engulf the castle,

• great slow wave of star obscuring darkness upon darkness that unfolds itself from out the forest with a geological inertia” and then pushes down upon us.

I recall we danced, those many years ago, and left the ball to see the night, together on those lit battlements that faced the airy dark. The castle was a great stone ship abright and cruising on a sea of black; the plains sparkled with lights, quivering in the intervening air like strings of stars.

We took the air there, you and I, and by and by, took each other's breath, and more exchanged.

“But our parents…'you whispered when that first kiss gave way to allow a mutual gasp for air and the incitement to the next. “But if somebody sees…”

Your dress was something black; velvet and pearls if I recall, scooped brocade to its front which, cupping your bosom, gave way beneath my hands. Exposed to the night and my mouth, your breasts were moon pale and down smooth, their aureoles and nipples dark as bruises, raised, thick and hard as a little finger's topmost joint; I sucked at you and you leant back, clutching at the stones, drawing the night in sharply through your teeth. Then, in a tiny, unexpected flood, a thick sweet taste came upon my tongue, like a premonition, like some involuntary resonance with the male's expected donation, and in that pallid light two shining beads of your milk shone, one tipping each of those tiny blood raised towers.

I devoured those pearls, slaking a thirst the more achingly intense for my utter ignorance of it until that moment. You gathered up your gown and skirts yourself, insisted that the winding stair door be bolted, then I laid you across the slates, beneath the stars. Was it then I really loved you first? I think it was, my sleeping one. Or perhaps it was later, in a calmer state… But I'd count that less; I'd prefer it was just lust. That seems more creditable, simply for being so helpless in the face of its own blood charged demands.

Love is common; nothing's more so, even hate (even now), and like their mothers everyone thinks theirs must be the very best. Oh, the fascination with love, art's profitable fixation with love; ah, the startled clarity, the revelatory force of love, the pulsing certainty that it is all, that it is perfect, that it makes us, that it completes us… that it will last for ever.

Ours is a little different, by consent. We became by all accounts and they were many, and various and frequently creative notorious; unwilling if unbowed outcasts long before our failed attempt to become refugees. It was our decision, though. Not for us that tawdry fascination, the cosy comfort of the crowd, their bedded warmth in shared exclusion. We see the world with two eyes, tuned for its ambivalence, and what arrests the eye of the small minded, liberates the mind of those with a broader view. This castle makes its mark upon the earth by being no longer part of the world from which it's raised; these stones inflict themselves upon the air with hard demand that's free to join that higher level only by not joining any rest. We took that as our premise; what else?

I pace these corridors while you sleep by the empty fire (the ashes like a pool, the furs and rugs that cover you the same colour). The clouds roll quietly in around us, damp smoke of what liquidic fire I cannot say. A transient current within the air brings the sound of a distant waterfall from the hills, and only the night finds final voice, in that black space a white, noise booming; meaningless.