Polystom (31 page)

‘How many men do I have?’ he asked Stet.

‘Forty-five, sir,’ he said. ‘Forty-five and two officers.’

The clouds were breaking up into sudsy patches. Within an hour the sky cleared to reveal evening purple. Two large guns were sledded up the bank of the ridge by teams of straining soldiers, and established (Sof ’s positioning) at either end of the new trench. The air was thickening with dusk, the sun burning as red as the tip of one of the lieutenant’s cigarettes, the atmospheric purples becoming denser and denser. Rations were served, and Polystom ate in his dugout with Stet and Sof.

‘What did the colonel fellow say, then, sir?’ Stet asked. ‘Orders?’

‘We’re to hold this place. Hold this ridge.’

By the time they had finished eating it was dark outside. Polystom accepted a cigarette from Sof even though he didn’t smoke. He lit it, sucked it, pulling on it like a teat, but only swilled the smoke around his mouth. It wasn’t very pleasant. But it helped keep the night midges at bay.

Conversation limped along. Inconsequential observations and long silences.

Polystom was in the middle of telling his lieutenants that they needed to find him a new batman, when the air growled with the distant sounds of multiple detonation. Stepping out of the dugout and clambering up the side of the trench, the three of them looked west. The land leading towards the horizon was black, but the sky behind gleamed with red and orange blurs and patches.

‘That’s west,’ said Stet. ‘North west.’

Knots of the men were standing about, all eyes in the same direction.
Boum-boum
, and the splashes of vivid colour in the night sky. There was something clothy, to Polystom’s ears, about the sounds of the explosions. So muffled by distance as to be almost mellow. But the fire-coloured billows looked fierce enough.

‘That’s some party going on over there,’ observed Sof.

‘Are those our bombs?’ Polystom asked, his head muggy with smoke. ‘Or theirs?’

The two lieutenants looked at him, and then at one another. ‘No way to tell, sir,’ said Stet.

The distant bombardment continued for several hours. Polystom lay down on his bed, in his dugout, clutching his one remaining pistol to his belly. He had brought up some blackberry brandy, and sipped at it, sipped at it. He couldn’t sleep.

The thump, thump, sounded through the walls like the mud’s own pulse.

Beeswing was in the room with him. His dead wife, here with him on this terrible planet. She was looking in at the door. Her hand, pale as life, was on the wooden doorjamb, and her beautiful, fragile face was peering round it at him. There was a question in her eyes. The vision was so vivid that Polystom’s heartbeat deepened and sped. He pulled himself upright, his pistol in his left hand.

He yelped with surprise.

The ghost did not back away, or vanish into nothingness. The roseate light from Polystom’s lamp caught and reflected from the planes of her face, twinkled orange in her eyes. Her lips looked plump, filled with blood. There was the aura of presence about her. He swung his legs round and stood up, dizziness whirring in his head. ‘Beeswing!’ he called out.

She looked up, looked into his eyes. The faintest of smiles animated her lips.

‘Hello,’ she said.

And then a powerful clatter shook the air, and the blackness behind Beeswing’s form flashed yellow. There was a crack, a rolling boom, and several coughing hacks of rifle fire. This was much closer than the distant bombardment. Beeswing turned her head, looked over her own shoulder, and then withdrew. She didn’t disappear in a puff of ghost-stuff: she slid backwards through the door into the night.

For a moment Polystom stood, motionless, a disconcerting sensation of intensity in his chest. Was this what it was like to encounter the dead? Was it a hallucination? The fact of her having been there hung, somehow, in the air, like perfume.

Then there was a second thunderous explosion, and he lurched forward, through the door and into the night.

Outside a cool drizzle was in the air, and the shadowy forms of men were hurrying up and down the trench. Another explosion threw orange light over the night-sky, blocking out a wedge-shaped shadow in the trench. Stom grabbed the nearest man to him.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Attack, sir.’

‘Where are the lieutenants?’

‘At the guns, sir.’

Polystom lumbered up the slippery steps and out of the trench. The two big cannons had been hauled up, and were now in position. The nearer of the guns was being rotated by a group of men, shadows in the darkness heaving the great weight round. The air was crackling with the sound of small-arms fire. ‘Stet?’ yelled Polystom. ‘Sof?’

‘Sir,’ Sof called back.

Polystom was at his side in moments. ‘Are we under attack?’

‘From the west, sir, we think. Flare!’ He shouted the word over his shoulder. ‘Now!’

A man raised his arm, and a flare exploded from the end of it. It burnt pale blue phosphorescence into the air, and the landscape around them swept into visibility. Polystom could see Sof ’s face, glass-pimpled with droplets of rain. The gun’s metal arm pointing at the horizon. The gaggle of men hauling at its base. He turned, as the flare sank, and saw the mud at the base of the ridge heaving and squirming with horrible motion. There was a powerful explosion, very close, away on the other side of the ridge, and yellow-orange mixed garishly with the blue. Sof and Polystom flinched simultaneously, drawing their shoulders up in a hunch.

‘Where are they firing from?’

‘Shoulder cannon, from down below, sir,’ grunted Sof, leaning forward. ‘You men in the trench,’ he bellowed. ‘Return fire. Now!’

From the trench below them came the snapping of rifle fire. ‘You’d better get back inside your dugout, sir,’ Sof gasped, turning back to the cannon. ‘Take cover, please sir.’

The blue light was fading, the darkness intensifying around the flare, and with a sputter it was gone. Sight vanished. Polystom was too stunned by the suddenness of the attack, and a little too drunk, to think clearly. He stood, uncertainly, turning left, turning right. As his eyes accustomed themselves to the renewed darkness he could see the darker gash of black against the ground that was the trench, needle-pricked by stuttering light as rifles were discharged. He could make out the massy shape of the gun. The shuffling figures at the base. He wanted to do something, to say something. Was there any point in the men firing into the darkness like that? Surely they couldn’t see to hit anything.

He thought of himself seeing his dead wife’s face in his dugout moments earlier. Had he been dreaming? Was he dreaming now?

‘Flare!’ ordered Sof.

Another fizzing beacon soared pale-blue, and again the seething landscape was laid before him. The blue light gave it a spectral quality. He could make out the individual humps of enemy soldiers making their way up the side of the ridge. He could see, further down, the crouching shapes of combatants peering out of the lower trenches and aiming shoulder-cannon. Then the flare started to fade, the light shrinking back to its source and disappearing.

A moment ago the ghost of his dead wife had said
hello
to him.

With a horrifying jolt immediately behind him, his own cannon fired. It startled Polystom so much he almost fell over. The barrel thrust out a spike of white fire, and everything went dark again. Over the chatter of rifles Polystom could hear the whistle of the shell, and then the distant crash it made. Below them was a splash of white orange light, and the rolling
boum
of impact.

Polystom put his hand to his forehead. His heart was racing. Startled into action by the gun going off unexpectedly. He could hear the muttering of the men at the gun, and then Sof ’s voice softly, almost coaxingly, ‘Fire.’

The gun spoke again; and again Polystom flinched. The gun crew scrabbled, the barrel sank a few inches, and there was a wash of heat as the chamber opened.

The gun spoke again, and spoke again. Polystom turned, and turned again, dizzy with the unreality of it. Then the gun at the far end of the trench clattered out a shot, and the nearer gun spoke once more in appalling harmony. Down below them, patches of white fire flurried and died away.

The rain was still ticking gently into Polystom’s face.

‘Here they come!’ shouted somebody.

The big gun spoke again, and by the subliminal illumination of its flame Polystom saw a figure rear up from the mud right in front of him, almost as if it were made of mud itself. The enemy was here. The enemy was upon him. Its head and torso gleamed, brown-shiny, and it was holding a
rod or pole of some sort. The light faded quickly and again it was dark. Polystom stood stupefied. Away to his left the flicker of rifle-fire pocked the darkness with little jagged spots of light. Without thinking consciously of what he was doing, Polystom saw that he had raised his own left hand. But that was absurd, because he wasn’t left-handed. Except, there it was, his left hand out in front of him, and with a jarring pressure up his arm that hurt his wrist the pistol in his hand discharged, discharged again, and then again. With each shot, the figure before him was strobed standing, lurching back, tumbling away.

The rain was falling with infinite softness.

The clatter of gunfire increased in intensity as the rain died away, making a mechanical echo of the rain-patter. A third flare flew upwards, and once again the landscape was coated with the eerie blue light. Polystom saw figures all around him now, some raising weapons, some shouldering fatter tubes, the enemy was upon them. His men, in the trench and around it, were standing taller, firing as rapidly as they could. Polystom’s own left wrist was sore. He swapped the gun into his right hand, raised it, checked that the slot was primed with bullets, and fired. He fired, turned, fired, fired again. The flare-light was dying. The enemy was upon them.

It was inky dark again. Polystom shot bullets into the darkness.

Something whistled past him in the dark, away to the left, briefly making the sort of pure harmonic that shatters wineglasses. ‘Sir!’ gasped somebody, at his side. One of the men. ‘Sir! Take cover, sir!’

The great guns bellowed. Rifle bullets flew. A pressure on Polystom’s elbow drew him to the left. He reached out with his right hand, where the gun weighed against his forearm and wrist, firing once, twice, into the night. ‘This way sir!’ And then his feet were on the steps going down into the trench. The rain had stopped falling.

At the bottom of the steps he was shuffled through into his dugout. The light made his eyes wince. He sat himself down in his chair. Only then, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the brightness of light, did he realise that he was panting. Excitement? Terror? The soldier who had brought him in was streaked with watery dirt; blood was coming sluggishly out of a wound on the side of his head. His ear seemed clipped, halved, and blood oozed out in visible pulses to run down his cheek and over his shoulder. ‘You’re shot,’ he said.

But the man was already turning away, going out of the door, returning to the battle.

Outside, the sounds of battle sounded clatteringly through the night air. Polystom sat in his chair, his gun in his lap. The barrel was hot, but soon became cold. There was an enormous inertia in his body now; not a tiredness, for he felt he could not sleep under any circumstances. But something that rooted him to the chair.

The staccato of battle slowed, the booming of the guns became more infrequent. It stopped. A silence more strange than the noise settled in the air. Still Polystom sat. Nothing was real, evidently. This silence was more tangible than the gunfire and cannonfire. Nothing was real.

Somebody was at the door.

‘Beeswing?’ he said.

But it was Stet. He came inside, exhausted-looking, and lit a cigarette. ‘We beat them off, sir,’ he said. ‘But it was a major attack. We might expect another one before dawn.’

‘It really happened, then?’ Polystom asked.

‘Oh yes, sir. Seven dead, and seven wounded. I’d get some sleep, sir. You should be able to manage a few hours.’

He left. Polystom looked at his bed, and hauled himself out of the chair. It took an enormous effort to reach the bed, and to sag onto it. But it wasn’t tiredness that weighed his limbs down. Something was wrong.

Perhaps he was stupefied by the unreality of things.

The light was still on. He hadn’t the strength to get up again and turn it off.

He lay on the bunk.

Night midges buzzed through the silence. Polystom could not sleep. He turned on his bed to face the wall. Mud. The silence was so intense it seemed to make a high-pitched hum in his ears. He turned again.

It had seemed so vivid, his vision of Beeswing. It had really been as if she were materially present in the room. Some sort of hallucination, possibly. Brought on by the pressure, by the stress of it all. Standing at the threshold. She had said
hello
. Had she been about to come in? Had that been it?

She had been about to come in, to greet him, to embrace him, to tell him something, some message from the other side of death. But the sound of the assault outside had scared her away. It was ridiculous, of course, he told himself, to think in these terms. Clearly, the stress of the situation had overburdened his mind. And yet, he thought, and yet even if she were nothing more than a figment of his heated imagination, it would be good to hear what that figment had to say. What might it have been?
I’m sorry
.

He turned in his bed again, facing the wall.

I’m sorry
.

He turned again.

There was a massive explosion, outside in the night air. His heart thumping, Polystom leapt from the bed and rushed to the door. At the threshold there was another violent noise, and heat washed over him. Fires were burning, red and yellow, on the ground at the top of the trench, throwing a sinuous light over everything. Polystom stumbled over a supine body, and tripped, falling onto his knees. As he was getting up he heard the sound of his own big guns returning fire, bashing the night air, crash crash, crash, and then only the voices of his men calling out in the dark.