Vellum (34 page)

“Get him cleaned up and secured,” he says to Henderson. “Let me know when he's conscious.”

The hatchling girl and the runaway boy are both long gone, one gone on the long walk into the Vellum, the other dead, a harmless ghost haunting the margins of reality, one death buried in a thousand others. There's no direct link between Finnan and Eresh, but maybe, just maybe, the Messenger boy knew something of what Eresh was up to, what kind of twisted forces she was playing with, what kind of twisted forces killing her let loose.

And maybe, just maybe, he told his old friend, Seamus Finnan.

one

THE HAMMERS OF HEPHAESTOS

BEYOND THE WAY OF SCYTHES

“T
o the end of the earth we've come,” says Corporal Powers, as he and Slaughter drag their drugged, bedraggled charge. “Beyond the way of scythes and lands unwalked by men.”

He looks around him at his world, so much of it off-scene—the distant boom of Hun artillery, the sky a strip of blue above the trench. To him it seems a stage, dressed with the wooden plankings and the sandbags, sleeping soldiers for its props, so distant from reality, distant from humanity.

“You have your orders from the dukes,” he says to Smith. “Bind this bold rebel to the soaring rocks, in uncorroding adamantine chains. He stole your glory, precious fire, gave it as a gift to men so all their arts now flower. For such a crime it's only right that he should pay his dues to the divine, that he may learn to love the tyranny of dukes, and end his philanthropic ways.”

Smith limps along behind the redcaps, chinking with the chains he carries, slowed by the trenchfoot, and thinking that he shouldn't even be here. Private with the Sheffield Pals, this is not his bloody business. No, it's not.

“Powers and Slaughter,” he says. “Your duty to the dukes is done, your part in this all over with, but I for one can't stand to bind a brother lord to this bleak precipice by force.”

And, in front of Smith, between Powers and Slaughter, the prisoner's boots drag after him, rattling on the duckboards; Powers and Slaughter stop a sec to heft him higher, adjust their grip under his arms, then set to pulling him on again along the trench.

“Ah, God, but I must steel myself,” says Smith, “be brave enough to carry out this deed; it would be grave to disregard the dukes' decree.”

As loath as he is then—but not quite as loath as the straight-talking and high treasonous son of Tims—he has no other option but to hammer home these hard chains in this harsh wasteland where, without a sight of any mortal frame, without the sound of any human voice, scorched by the sun's white flame, he knows the prisoner's beauty's bloom will be destroyed.

“You'll welcome night's dark cloak of stars over the light,” he whispers, “welcome the sun when it dissolves the frost of dawn. But you will always wear the burden of your present pain, for your deliverer is as yet unborn.”

These are the fruits of all philanthropy, it seems to Smith. A lord who scorned the wrath of lords, and gave more glory to the workers than was due, condemned to guard this joyless rock, stand sleepless and erect, and utter sighs and lamentations, to no end.
The will of lords, like your own knee,
Smith thinks,
is hard to bend.

“All kings,” he says, “are hardest when their power is new.”

THE WASTED WOUNDED LAND

Seamus notices that Powers and this other fellow are talking like a right pair of fookin toffs, sure, and it's almost funny, it is, and he'd fookin laugh but he's too busy trying to put his best foot forward, as they say, and finding it kind of difficult on account of the world heaving up and down and his stomach and his head doing much the same thing only in different directions and at different times, and these two cherrynob bastards, Powers and Slaughter, dragging him along between them faster than he can keep up with. Sure and if they'd only let him be, he could fookin walk his self, he's not that fookin drunk.

“Why the delay and all this pointless pity?” he hears Powers's poisoned little voice say. “Why not hate the lord all lords hate most? He has betrayed your prize to common men.”

“The bond of brotherhood is strange,” says Smith, somewhere behind him.

“Agreed, but would you disobey your orders? Don't you fear this more?”

“Ever the pitiless and the proud,” says Smith.

“I shed no tears for this one; it solves nothing. Don't waste your time.”

And fook you and yer mammy too, Powers, ye cunt,
thinks Seamus.
I always knew ye were a prick.
He pulls his left foot forward again, trying to get it under him for support, but it's no use. His right leg isn't working at all now—sure and it's probably busted from the fooker kicking it—he heard it crack, so he did, and it hurts like fookin buggery—but he could still walk if the bastards would only let him, he's sure. He's not that fookin drunk.

“I hate my handiwork,” says Smith.

“Why hate your craft? It's not to blame for his misfortune.”

“Still, I would rather that this task had fallen to another.”

“All things are trials except to rule the lords; freedom is for the dukes alone.”

Well, maybe he is that drunk, thinks Seamus, 'cause sure and the two of them aren't making any sense at all, by Christ. What's all this shite about lords and dukes? What the fook are the pair of them blathering about? Is it the Duke of Underland they're gabbing on about—no, Sunderland, he means—no, Butcher Cumberland, it is—or is it Slumberland—ah, bollocks!—what the fook's whoever it is got to do with anything? Oh, Jesus, but he shouldn't have drunk all of the captain's fookin whisky, though, 'cause he's a fookin mess and he can't even keep his fookin thoughts straight, never mind these gobshites talking utter rot.

“I know,” says Smith. “There's nothing I can say against this.”

And Sergeant Seamus Finnan tries to pull his left foot forward over the mud, and tries to pull his mind out of the haze of blood and whisky that he's swimming in, but it's no use. He's fucked, and his whole world is fucked along with him, and all that he knows is the taste of bile burning in his throat, and the stink of whisky and puke that fills his nostrils now—by Christ, but it's better than the stench of corpses—and the rough hands of the CMPs—Powers and Slaughter—pulling his arms near out of their sockets as they drag him through the wasteland, through the fookin wasted, wounded land, with all its cesspit scars of trenches and the open sores of craters; and they throw him down into the dark of the dugout and he lies there, wishing the world would stop its spinning, Jesus Christ Almighty, wishing the world would just fookin stop.

Outside, the shelling of the German batteries sounds like the distant boom of thunder.

AN ADAMANTINE WEDGE, A STUBBORN SPIKE

He feels Smith pulling him up onto his feet, leaning him against the wooden shoring of the dugout, the solid but swaying surface of it against his back, and he tries to roll his head up, tries to raise his hand to wipe the blood and mud out of his eyes, to look the bastard in the face, but his arm is being insubordinate and just sort of waving in the air. He feels Smith grip his wrist. His foot slips and he stumbles, slumps, only the wall behind holding him up.

“Hurry it up and put the bonds about him,” Powers says. “You want the Captain to see you wasting time?”

Through vision blurred by booze and blood, Seamus sees Smith hold up the manacles in his hands, a gesture that says,
Look; shut up and let me do my job.

“Put them about his hands with firm strength,” Powers goes on. “Strike with the hammer. Nail him to the rocks.”

His legs give way, and Smith has to drag him back up by his lapels, steady him against the wood.

Seamus retches again, spits blood and bile, and looks from Powers to Smith and back again, and then at Slaughter standing in the doorway, saying nothing. The red collar of his tunic, under his greatcoat, is all covered in Seamus's puke; it serves the bastard right. That's what ye get for a fookin rifle butt in the stomach, ye fookin redcap bastard.

“It's done, and not in vain this work,” says Smith.

Seamus's head is clearer now, not much, but just enough to know there's something wrong. There's something fookin wrong.

“Strike harder. Tighter. Leave nothing loose,” says Powers.

Seamus watches the man's lips moving and even with the double vision and all, he's sure the movements of the mouth don't match the words. Oh, aye, there's something fookin wrong, all right.

He feels cold metal snap around his wrist, his hand raised up above his head and locked there. What the fook is this? His legs buckle and he slips again, shouts out as pain explodes in his shoulder, with all his fookin weight on it and all. Ah, Christ, is that what a dislocated shoulder feels like?

“This one has skills,” says Powers. “He can escape from the impossible.”

“Aye, but this arm,” says Smith, “is inextricably fixed.”

Seamus moans, trying to push himself back up onto his wobbling legs. Damn right it's fookin fixed.

“And clasp this now securely. Let him learn he is a duller schemer than the dukes.”

He tries to curse them, tries to ask them what the fook they're on about, what dukes, what bloody dukes—but his tongue's too thick to form the words and it just comes out of his busted lips as a formless moan. Is this some fookin Orangeman secret code or something? Ah, Jesus, but that shite doesn't matter over here, does it, with the 1st Dubs and the Orangemen of the 36th Ulster fighting side by side and dying side by side and—Oh, but that's not what he was saying earlier, is it? Ah, Christ, now what the fook was he going on about? Did he really say that the King could go fook himself? He didn't, did he?

“No one could justly blame me…except him,” says Smith as he pulls Seamus's other hand around to snap another manacle into place, to drag it up over his head. Another click and Seamus hangs there like a puppet, arms in fookin agony. Aw, Christ, he's fookin lost his mind, or it's the fookin whisky, or they've knocked his fookin brains out of his head, or all of it, but he's either seeing things or hearing things, or both, because the world just isn't right. This fellow—Smith—this fellow's lips are mouthing different words to what he's hearing—Christ, but he's sure of it—and this is all wrong. He's seen Powers kick the shite out of a prisoner before, but never this. Jesus, this is the kind of awful shite that Fritz would do to a soldier caught on the wrong side of the wire.

Powers comes closer, reaches behind him, pulling his rifle's bayonet out of its sheath. He passes it to Smith. O, Christ. O, Jesus Christ.

“Now nail an adamantine wedge's stubborn spike square through his breast.”

O, Jesus Fookin Christ Almighty.

“Alas. Alas,” says Smith. “Prometheus, I groan for thy afflictions.”

PROMETHEUS

Seamus looks down at the point of the bayonet pressed to his chest. This is insane. He must be dreaming. He must be drunk and dreaming, out of his head on the captain's whisky and in a bloody nightmare. Sure and what day is it, he thinks, and who's the prime minister, where am I, what am I doing here? But even though he's drunk and only just coming round from a fair fookin beating obviously, he can remember it all just fine. He knows exactly how far the trench is from the River Ancre, that it's the 28th of June, that it's Lloyd George and Haig in charge; and everything fits so fookin well together except for the words and the spike, that he's sure it's happening to him, here, now. He can't doubt but that it's happening. But sure and he has to.

Smith holds the bayonet there for what seems an eternity.

“Do you hesitate and groan for the duke's enemies?” says Powers. “Beware or maybe one day you'll be pitying yourself.”

“You see a sight that's hard to watch,” says Smith, but his lips are mouthing,
God, I'm sorry.
Jesus, but the look on his face is—Jesus—it's the way that Seamus looked when poor Thomas went doolally and Seamus and the lads had to…had to try and beat some sense into him and afterward, when he was walking away, Seamus caught a glimpse of himself in a wee shaving mirror hanging from a hook on the wall and it was that same fookin look.
I'm sorry I have to do this to ye.
It's the look of someone telling themself there isn't any choice.

And the bayonet drives through his chest and, breaking skin and flesh and bone and heart, it drives right through and thuds into the wood against his back.

“I see him meeting his deserts,” says Powers, as Seamus Finnan's world goes blinding white with pain.

Sure and it has to be a nightmare. It fookin has to be.

“Put straps around his sides, though.”

His world is blinding white. The pain goes right through the center of his chest like the fookin gas huts where they had to practice to prepare themselves for the mustard gas over here which thank fook he's never had to suffer yet though he's seen those as have, by Christ, not getting their masks on before they got not a lungful but a half a breath, and them gasping, grasping, like him now with it burning in his lungs, in his heart, in his throat, like something trying to get out.

“I know what's needed. Don't harass me.”

The blizzard of his agony howls into his head, so raw a pain that he can hear it, he can fookin hear it, drowning their distant voices.

“I'll harass you all I want and more. Go lower. Surround the thighs with force.”

He hears the distant thunder of the shells, the ringing sound of metal upon metal, hammering in his ears.

“The work is no laborious task. It's all but done already.”

Doom. Doom. Doom. And all the time the howling of this pinned animal inside him.

“Drive the fetters strongly, all the way; they have to stand up to a harsh critique.”

“Your mode of speech,” he hears Smith say, “suits your physique.”

“Be soft yourself, but don't reproach me for stern strength of will.”

“Let's go. His limbs are in the net.”

He hears the voice hissing up close, right by his ear, over the hurricane of white noise and his own—Jesus, it's not a moan, it's not a sob, it's not a keen, it's not a scream. What kind of fookin sound is that?

“Now, now. Be proud,” says Powers. “Plunder the powers of the divine and give your gifts to the ephemerals now. How can your workers soothe you in this sorry state? It seems we called you Foresight falsely; or perhaps you can foresee just how exactly you'll escape this fate.”