Vellum (35 page)

And Seamus feels his lips open and he hears the sound come out his mouth, the sound of a thousand rivers roaring.

A DUGOUT, THE SOMME, 28 JUNE 1916

Smith steps back from the crazy Irishman cuffed to the metal frame of the bunk in the corner of the dugout, lying there dead to the world but babbling on in drunk delirium. He's never heard anything like it and it puts the fear of God in him, by heck; he's heard some of the other paddies speaking their Gaelic, and he knows it don't sound nowt like this. Those boys from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers have a lilting, soft sound—the ones under this Finnan fellow's charge, at least, seconded from the 7th to the 1st after the slaughter of Gallipoli, so they say. Students from Trinity mainly, those boys. Could have been officers but they chose to fight beside their friends. Call them the toffs among the toughs, they do, though this Finnan's an exception. A tough among the toffs, ye might say. And whatever tongue it is he's speaking, it's not the gentle brogue of his Irish Pals. It's something…else.

Powers steps forward to give the man one last boot in the stomach before wheeling and striding out of the dugout, Slaughter following on his heels. Typical redcaps, thinks Smith. Busted lip and bloody nose, two eyes that'll be black for a week—they've left him in a right state, by heck. He'll be hurting some when he wakes up all right, and it won't just be a sore head from too much firewater.

Poor fellow's done for anyway now, thinks Smith. It might have been fine if it were just the stealing of an officer's whisky. He would have lost his stripes, for sure, and there would have been a big to-do, a court-martial and a prison sentence—commuted to field punishment, most likely—but if the Irish lads under his charge are anything like Smith's own Sheffield Pals, they were needing something to take their minds off what they'd done…and what they'd still to do…as anyone could see, as even the captain might have seen. There's worse things in the world than a sergeant stealing his captain's whisky and dishing out a little to the scared young boys he's only trying to care for best he can.

But the charge is sedition now and that's something else entirely. There's trouble enough amongst the paddies that have heard about the Easter Uprising back home, without their own sergeant staggering around and roaring like a wounded bear about republican martyrs—MacDonagh and MacBride, and Connolly and Pearse.
Why the fuck are we fighting for the British when they're killing Ireland's sons at home?
That's treason, no matter how you look at it.

Smith shakes his head. He's sorry for the man. He truly is. But that kind of talk is just asking for the firing squad when the troops are skittish enough as it is about the rumors of a Big Push.

Finnan rolls over onto his back, his free arm flopping loose, hand grasping as if at some imaginary firefly, and Smith jumps back. The muttering stops for a second, then starts up again, louder than before. It's not English, that's for sure, and if it isn't Irish, what the hell is it? Smith knows a little Kraut—
Scheisser
and
Hände hoch
—but it's not so guttural and ugly as all that. Latin or Greek? He doesn't think so. He wasn't the best student by a long way and he never made it to the local grammar school or nowt, but Smith's still had enough of those rammed down his throat, from his teachers and from Mad Jack Carter—is there no escaping it, by heck?—with all his talk of Homer's heroes. He's heard enough bloody Taciturn and Virgin, as they used to call the buggers, to know it's none of that.

He stands up, steps back from the man. It's probably just gibberish, he thinks. Shell shock and firewater and a boot to the head. Nothing more.

But it still makes him uneasy, this strange babbling with its unfamiliar sounds. There's too many of them. Too many sounds for one mouth to make.

He feels queasy, frightened, turns to go and realizes Powers and Slaughter are standing just outside the dugout, waiting for him, stark silhouettes in the doorway, hulking bulks with sharp points. The red-covered peaked caps, the barrels of their rifles slung over their shoulders pointing upward—even the thick swaddling of their greatcoats seems all angular—shoulders so square, and the flare from belted waist down to the hem. They're men cut in straight lines, without a curve in them. He looks back at the Irishman, lying there spread-eagled on the floor of the dugout, his handcuffed arm dangling, his left leg twitching like he's trying, in his dreams, to pull himself out of some churned-up mire of sucking mud. And still there's that infernal muttering.
Where are you now?
thinks Smith.
Where are you in your head?

But it's not his business. He's only here because Powers barked at him to pick up the handcuffs where they'd fallen in the struggle. He feels sorry for the man, more so because the only reason Powers didn't cuff the fellow himself, he's sure, is so that he could play the bully a little after being floored by a drunk man's flailing fist, big man that he is. But it's not Smith's business.

“Out,” says Powers. “Don't worry. He's not going anywhere.”

A Net of Wires and Chains

Another time, another place.

“You're not going anywhere,” says Henderson, his hand clamped over Finnan's jaw, shoving his head away with disgust as he lets go, and turning, striding away into receding echoes of his footsteps—shoes on concrete—and a flap of plastic hanging strips?

Finnan's head rolls round and down and hangs there, limp. Half slumped, half upright on the metal chair, the wire cuts into his wrists, looped in snares and pulled as tight as the garrote around his neck. It's the same story with his ankles. They haven't just tied him to the chair with the chicken wire. His arms behind his back and over the back of the chair, he's trussed up like an animal in some net of wires and chains all looped and crossing each other so that if he as much as moves one limb he's liable to cut another off.

The net of wires cuts into him almost as bad as the memories.

He coughs, moans, his swollen eyes opening just enough to see the meat hook in his chest, a circle of salt around him on the floor—but he can't understand the image of it; a part of him thinks, right so, there's a fookin meat hook in me chest, but the rest of him is too busy with the hammering and the howling to be disturbed by a wee thing like physical pain. All it knows is the hammering howling in his mind, rising in him, unfurling.

It raises his head, eyes rolling back to show the whites, opens his mouth and out it comes.

“To the divine sky and the swift wings of the winds, I sing, and to the rivers and their springs; to all the miles of the waves of smiling seas, I call, to the earth, the mother of us all, to the sphere of the sun that watches over everything. Behold the lord. See how I suffer at the hands of lords.”

The voice that gutters from his throat, choked as it is, growls on some frequency that ripples the misty air of the slaughterhouse, sends ice crystals twinkling, tinkling down in showers from the frozen carcasses that hang all round him, row upon row of them all swinging from hooks on chains on rails, rack after rack, white-frosted hunks of dangling meat. Finnan roars at them like a revolutionary preaching to the mob, hearing the words pour from his mouth but only barely understanding them. It's like he has an interpreter yammering in one ear as a captured Hun screams in his other, except that Finnan's voice is both.

“See these unsightly chains that the new ruler of the blessed has arranged for me! Alas, I groan. See what torment I'll suffer down the aeons of my time in misery! When will I see the end? Alas, I groan. Alas for the present and the future woe.”

Teeth bared and nostrils flared, he hears the words coming out of his own mouth, feels them ripping their way up out of the raw wound in his chest and spitting from between his lips.
What the fuck am I saying? Where the fuck is this coming from?

“I'll tell you all that I foresee,” he's shouting after Henderson. “No evil comes to me unknown. I know exactly what will be, and I will learn the force of destiny. I'll bear my fate without a care, but I will neither tell you what you want to hear nor hold my tongue about my state.”

He screams it at the air itself. The air itself rips with the sound.

“I have been bound to doom for giving mortal men a gift. I stole fire's source, carried it off within a hollow reed in stealth, to be the teacher of all art to mortals and increase their wealth. I pay this price for all my pains—riveted under the sky, in chains.”

And white-eyed Finnan hurls his invocation in a howl that rises from a place inside him deeper than he's been for near a century, and here, in this charnel house, far from the mire of the Somme, far from the time of blood and mud when he first felt that fierce thing piercing him, he feels the meat hook as an adamantine spike that drives down through his chest and through his heart and through the rock of bleak Caucasian mountains, into the Vellum itself.

There's a part of him that's conscious, that's still Seamus Finnan. But, right now, it's lost in the blizzard of white pain and in the curses of a chained god.

“Behold this luckless lord,” he roars, “the enemy of dukes, reviled by all the lords who walk the halls of heaven, bound for too much love of workers.”

And somewhere out there in the Evenfall, his words stir up an answer in the air of night filled with a dust that flows like shadow, flits like wings.

INCHGILLAN WAR HOSPITAL, 1917

He sits looking out the window, watching the gulls wheel in the air over the cold, gray sea and the cold, gray rocks, trying to project himself out of his head, out of his body sitting here with the wood of the chair hard under his arse and the wood of the table hard under his elbow, and his fingers pressed against the squeaky glass pane of the sash-and-case window, like he could just dissolve himself into it and away, away. The big house is drafty, and no matter how much they tart it up with all the magnolia paint and white gloss on the wooden paneling below, and all the shiny linoleum on the floor, they can't hide the fact that they're all fookin alone here, all the mad, the maimed, the blind and the trembling, here in what was once Inchgillan Asylum and before that some dusty old laird's dusty old castle. So who the fook ever thought of sending us to the bloody Scottish Highlands to fookin
con valesce,
Seamus wonders, to sit here shivering as much from the fookin cold as from the fookin shell shock, and—O, but wait there, he thinks, it's not shell shock, anymore, O no, it's fookin
nerve trouble
and
anxiety neurosis
and
hysteria
and fookin
neurasthenia,
to be sure, or it's just plain old fookin
NYD—not yet diagnosed
—because it's not the fookin shells what do it, it's yer own fookin lack of nerve, lad; it's a fookin coward, ye are. Ye see, it's only the fookin officers that get shell shock and get sent off to play fookin badminton and cricket and write their fookin poetry at Craiglockhart.

Not that he blames them for it. No, he's got nothing against the poor fools that had to give the daft orders or get shot themselves; they're all in the same boat, underneath the skin, that is, inside their heads. And that Sassoon fellow, well, Seamus only wishes him the best. Sure and he put the wind up them at Parliament with his Declaration, so he did, it's in all the papers, and Seamus would have liked to see the look on the fookers' faces when that was read out. Oh, yes, he would've liked to see that.

Seamus slurps a sip of his tea, the stewed and sugary brew that the nurses make so much the same as army tea ye wouldn't believe it. One for ye and one for me, and one for the pot and one for luck. Sweet as can be and twice as hot. Sure and the sisters are sweet wee lassies, so they are, and they just want what's best for all the poor broken bastards in their care, but Seamus can't help thinking that they're like some well-meaning but dottery ole nan giving a sweety to a greeting wean, too blind to see that the wean is greeting because it's only gone and cut its fookin wrists open with a breadknife.
Och
dear, now that's an awful mess ye've made, dear. Och, but don't you worry yourself none, 'cause
the sister here'll clean it up, so she will, so don't you fret yourself
And while the blood just pumps out and pumps out, they just hand ye yer fookin tea and say,
There ye
go, now, get that down ye, now, now there's a good lad.

Good lad. There's not a fookin lad among them.

He looks around the room at the others: at Peake sitting at the table at the corner, working away on his notebooks with all the cartoons scribbled in the margins, all the faces with their hooded eyes and beak noses, cruel caricatures of nobs and lackeys; at Kettle and Duggan playing gin rummy with two orderlies at the table in the middle of the room; at the new fellow sitting up at the other window and facing out as well, like Seamus's own fookin mirror image, but in black-tinted spectacles, with the soft, pink scars from the mustard gas around his eyes. If he's blind, Seamus wonders, what the fook is he doing staring out the window? But then again, maybe he's staring out the window because he
can't
fookin see the world out there, thinks Seamus. If he could see it, maybe he'd just be sitting in his room right now, afraid to come out at all, the way some of them are. The poor fookers that just sit there shaking. Christ, there's one of them who doesn't hear a fookin word ye say unless it's “bomb,” and when he hears that, why then, it's up he jumps and hides under the fookin bed. No fookin wonder Seamus hardly sees most of the patients here at Inchgillan. O, but he hears them all right. He hears them all night.

But, no, there's no such fookin thing as shell shock.

Seamus takes another slurp of his tea and looks out of the window again; he doesn't want to think about it, because when he thinks about the others, he thinks about his self. And that's when he gets his turns, when he starts to feel it all pressing down on him, and the whispering, the sound like cold wind, wings and hammering.
No,
he says to his self,
don't think about it.