Edward Whittemore - Nile Shadows

That's right. Always. The Sergeant of the Empire, Our Colly of Champagne, a legend no matter what.

You remember what they used to say about him when we were young. There was just no stopping Our Colly, not ever. He was a class apart and a man apart and they just don't make them like that anymore, that's what they used to say. . Our Colly? He was the man who defied the law of averages a hundred times and got away with it. No man could ever do what he did, but Our Colly did it all the same. .

That's what they used to say, wasn't it?

Yes, whispered Bletchley. . Oh yes.

Sure. Oh yes is what it was, and I remember it and so do you. But did you ever know that way back then in the beginning, when the last war started, Colly tried to enlist first in the royal marines?

No, I've never heard that, said Bletchley. Is that true?

Yes, they wouldn't take him. Undersized, Colly was, too scrawny altogether. So next he tried the navy and they wouldn't have anything to do with him either. Not only undersized but his English was still pretty limited then. Yes. No. Thank you. Please pass the potatoes. A stunted childhood, you see. He'd always been handy in a fishing boat as a boy, but the cold winds had kept him low to the deck and they'd also kept him from putting on any weight. Cold winds can do that. The weight goes to keeping the wind out and keeping the body halfway warm. So after that, Colly went around to the army, and they weren't about to be particular if a body was halfway warm, so they took him. One scrawny undersized kid who couldn't speak very well. That was Colly and that was how it all began for him.

I never knew that, said Bletchley.

No, most people don't. A hero's a hero, after all, and we like to have them in troubled times. So Colly managed to get into the army by lying about his age and by drinking a couple of quarts of water before they weighed him in, and then he took a big piss and went to France and did what he did there, and pretty soon he was known as Our Colly, everybody's, the man who could defy the law of averages and get away with it. And then later he went on to do the same kinds of things out here, on camelback, a mysterious Gulbenkian in disguise pulling off all sorts of wild tricks in Ethiopia and Palestine and Spain.

So that was Colly's way and Colly's path, the way of the Our, and once we talked about it in Jerusalem when I was still playing poker there, just before I left. Colly came to call and we put up our feet and talked about it. And the worst part about being an Our, he said, is living up to what people expect of you. You have to keep giving more and more of yourself, he said, until. .

Not that he didn't like what he was doing, he did like it. In fact he loved it. But still. . and yet. .

as he said. But still. And yet.

Sure. You remember all the things they used to say about Our Colly when we were young. I heard them often enough and you must have heard them in whatever hospital you were lying around in then, feeling useless with your dreams of a career in the army as shot up as you were, as shattered as the left side of your own face. And maybe you thought about Colly more than once as those next years came along and you were still lying around in hospital beds, waiting while they performed one useless operation after another and tried to get the rest of those glass and metal fragments out of your eye socket, just waiting and waiting while they reconstructed the bridge of your nose a little and kept breaking your hand and trying things a different way so you might be able to move it a little.

Waiting, you were. Waiting. Waiting and hoping they could put a glass eye in. But the bones and the muscles weren't there anymore, and the glass eye looked like a colored bead off in the side of your face somewhere, so you had to settle for an eye patch and wiping around it and being stared at.

And maybe Our Colly came to mind again when more years went by and you decided to settle for this, because it was the closest you could ever come to being in the regular army, which was all you'd ever wanted in life because you came from an army family and you'd grown up thinking that someday, someday, you might even have your own regiment. Maybe even the regiment your father commanded and his father before him, because it was a career and a calling that was in your blood and just a natural part of fathers and sons, a natural part of the scheme of things. .

Nothing to wonder about. Just the way it was.

Or rather, the way it had been back then in the beginning, before it turned out otherwise. Before you went to the front as a young man and put a spyglass to your eye and a bullet shattered the spyglass and shattered your face, shattering everything in sight, all that was and all that would be, shattering every dream you ever had and leaving you with a face that terrifies children and terrifies just about everybody, if the truth be known.

The evil eye, Bletchley. Anybody would be secretly frightened by it and you know why that is. We look at you and we see something that could happen to us, that is us, and it terrifies us. So we try not to look at you and we try to ignore you because we're not like you after all, of course we're not, we're nothing like you.

Just consider it. Now, when there's a great war going on and everybody's killing everybody for the sake of. . just consider the matter rationally for a moment. Children look at you and scream.

Children look at you and run away. But don't the rest of us say nice things to little children? Don't we smile at them and don't they smile back? Of course, and we're not like you, we're not ugly.

That's not why the whole human race is killing somebody or other. There's no evil in us. .

And so we like to scorn you a bit because that's the easier way. Because you're not really human, because you're not like the rest of us. Because we're not ugly, you are, and we don't want to face that face of yours. Our own face. . adjusted a little by circumstances. .

Bletchley was moving around uneasily as he sat there on the end of the little pier beside Joe. He was gripping his bad hand with his good hand and staring out at the river, not sure what to make of Joe's sudden rush of words, so demanding and insistent, so unlike any side of Joe he had seen before.

Joe, I think that. .

I know it. We have to be leaving and I'm almost finished, and I will be by the time that felucca comes around into the wind again. It's working its way up the river all right and it's due to come around, so just give it another few seconds tacking on its present course.

Joe smiled. He touched Bletchley's arm.

There's a point to all this. Could you just turn and look at me?

Slowly, Bletchley did so. Slowly, he turned and looked at Joe, who was smiling.

Good. It's just this, said Joe. You're not very different from Colly. You're not very different at all.

A peculiar expression came over Bletchley's face, disbelief followed by sadness and resignation, and then by a terrible uncertainty. He was about to say something when Joe tightened his grip on Bletchley's arm.

Wait, whispered Joe. I'm not making fun here and I'm not taking matters lightly and I'm not saying that spyglass didn't do its unkind work years ago, because it did. We both know it did. But I knew Colly, you have to remember that. Not only Our Colly but the one behind that. When we were young we worked our days together with fishing nets, and there were also long nights when we lay in bed and talked of what was to come for us, the wind howling and the rain beating down as if it would never stop, back before he became Ours, everybody's. Just him back then, scrawny and undersized, the way it was, that's all. And when I see what's behind that mask of yours, I know the two of you have a lot in common deep down where it counts. The little things on the surface aside.