Iain Banks: The Bridge

I drew the nervous, head-tossing mares back at last, facing the equally disturbed pair on the other side of the rock-cleared oval space. My hands were shaking and a cold sweat had broken on my brow. I squinted ahead, desperate to see just who my strange adversary was, but above the glare of the carriage lamps there was only the faintest outline of a figure, and the face was quite invisible.

There was no mirror I was certain (even this absurd possibility at that moment seemed more acceptable than anything else), and besides, the horses facing me were white, not dark like the pair attached to my carriage. I wondered what to do next. I could see no alternative route through the pass; the boulders and rocks which had been cleared to form the track had been piled-up forming a makeshift wall half the height of a man on either side of the way. Even if I was able to find a gap, the ground beyond would be so rough and broken as to remain impassable.

I put the whip away, climbed down to the stony ground. The other driver did the same. I hesitated when I saw this, the sensation of unattributable but intense unease striking me again. Almost involuntarily, I turned and looked behind me, past the sealed carriage, down the road from the lip of the plateau. To return, to retrace my steps, was unthinkable. Even had my purpose been mundane, had I been some ordinary traveller merely intent on reaching a remote inn or distant town on the other side of the pass, I would have been reluctant in the extreme to turn back; I had seen no other tracks or roads deviating from the path I had taken from the station far below in the valley, and I had heard of no other pass through these mountains within a day's ride. Given the nature of my cargo and the urgency of my mission, I had no choice but to continue on the way I had chosen. Under the pretence of pulling my collar tighter about me, I pressed the bulk of my concealed revolver against my chest. Stealing myself, trying to reach within my being to draw on whatever reserves of rationality and courage I could find, it all but escaped my notice that the figure standing in the glare of the opposing lights seemed to mimic my movements, also pulling on his lapels or collar, before stepping forward.

The fellow was dressed something like myself; in truth, any other apparel in that frigid atmosphere would have invited a quick end. His coat might have been a little longer, his body a little more thick set than mine. He and I came level with the shaking heads of our horses. My heart was beating, now, with a rapidity and a ferocity I could not recall having experienced before; a sort of horror drew me on, made me walk towards this still not-quite-seen figure. It was as if some magnetic repulsion, which before had kept our two carriages from meeting and passing, had now been reversed, and so sucked me inexorably forward, drawing me towards something my heart made clear I feared - or should fear - utterly, in the way some people are fatally attracted towards an abyss while standing on its very edge.

He stopped. I stopped. It was with a surging sense of relief, a brief feeling of total and unalloyed joy that I saw this man did not have my own face. His face was squarer than my own, his eyes were closer together and deeper set, and over his mouth there was a dark moustache. He looked at me, standing in the light of my lamps as I stood in the light of his, and inspecting my face with, I imagined, the same intense and relieved expression I exhibited myself. I started to speak, but got no further than 'My good -' before I stopped. The man had started to talk at the same time as I had; some short word or phrase, seemingly addressing me as I had been about to address him. It was, I was now sure, a foreign tongue he used, but I could not identify it. I waited for him to speak again, but he stood without speaking, apparently studying my face.

We shook our heads at the same moment. 'This is a dream,' I said quietly, while he spoke softly in his own tongue. 'This cannot be happening,' I continued. 'This is not possible. I am dreaming and you are something from within myself.' We fell silent, together.

I looked at his carriage, as he looked at mine. His conveyance appeared to be the same type as my own. Whether his was sealed, locked and strapped shut like mine, whether its contents were as important and awful as those secured in my carriage, I could not tell.

I stepped suddenly to one side; he moved at the same instant, as though to block me. We stepped back. I could smell the fellow now; a strange odour of some musky perfume mingling with stale hints of a foreign spice or bulb. His face wrinkled slightly, exactly as if he were smelling something from my person, something he found vaguely unsettling or distasteful. One of his eyebrows flickered oddly, just as I remembered my pistol. I had the most absurd and fleeting mental picture of us pulling and firing our revolvers, and the lead projectiles meeting and striking each other in mid air, flattening into a perfectly circular coin of squashed metal. My imperfect double smiled, just as I did so myself. We shook our heads; this motion at least seemed not to require translating, though it occurred to me that a similarly slow and thoughtful nodding of the head would have suited the situation just as well.. We each stepped back, and looked around at the quiet, cold, barren landscape of that high place as though in its very desolation we might find something to inspire one of us, or both.

I could think of nothing.

We each turned, walked back to our carriages and climbed into our seats.

A dim figure in the shadow behind the uneven light of his carriage's lamps (as I no doubt was to him), he sat, motionless for a while, then took up the reins - just as I did - with a sort of resigned shrug and a bending of the back and a grasping with one hand which looked like the motions of an old man (and I mirrored him, and I knew a sort of ancient bitterness, a heaviness, an ice-brittle thickness which invaded me, more deadly and intense than any air-borne chill).

He tugged gently at the heads of his horses; I signalled to mine in the same fashion. We started to turn our carriages round, using our own confined area of the small passing place, edging back and forth and whistling together at our horses.

When we are level , I decided, square on like battling ships of the line, I shall draw my gun and shoot . I cannot go back; no matter that he will not give way, regardless of his determination; I must go on, I have no choice.

We slowly manoeuvred our awkward vehicles until they were abreast. His, like mine, was locked, shuttered, strapped tight. He looked at me, and reached, with an almost complacent slowness, into his coat, just as I did the same thing, feeling past my jacket to the inside pocket and carefully withdrawing my gun. Would he remove his glove? We each hesitated, then he unbuttoned his glove at the wrist, just as I did. He laid the glove on the seat as his side, then raised the gun to point at me.

He pulled the trigger just as I did. There were two small clicks, nothing more.

We each pulled the chambers open; in the light of one lamp I could see the hammer in my gun had struck home on the base of the cartridge; a tiny dent showed on the copper-coloured metal. The round, like his apparently, had been damp, or somehow badly made. This happens, occasionally.

He looked at me again, and our smiles were sad. We each put our revolvers back in our jackets, then we turned our carriages fully round, and I with my dread load, and he with his, rode back, towards the valleys and the clouds.

'. . .then we both fire at the same time, or at least we both pull the triggers at the same time, but nothing happens. Both rounds are duds. So we just. . . smile at each other, in a resigned sort of way, I suppose, and finish turning the carriages right round, and then head back the way we came.' I stop talking.