The Dead Men Stood Together (2 page)

He looked at me with an odd expression, a little surprised, no doubt, that I was actually trying to understand him. He searched my face for any sign that I was joking at his expense.

‘The Devil,’ he repeated, as though I had been too stupid to understand his meaning the first time.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I saw him,’ he said, pointing to his head. ‘In here.’

‘And did he have horns and goat’s feet? Was he lit by flames?’

The pilot’s boy regarded me for a moment and then shook his head, as though it was not worth the effort to explain to me. Then, seeming to change his mind, he turned back and spoke again.

‘I don’t know about the things you say,’ he said. ‘But he is the Devil.’

He looked so serious; I had to find out more.

‘And he was going to my house? You’re sure?’

The pilot’s son nodded solemnly but said nothing more. I shrugged, uncertain whether to continue this conversation or just let him grow bored with it. Somehow I couldn’t let it go.

‘He was probably just a customer wanting to order some baskets from my mother,’ I said. ‘What did he look like? Maybe I know him.’

The pilot’s son frowned and cocked his head, closing his eyes clearly trying to picture the scene.

‘He had a rabbit in one hand, two birds in the other,’ he continued.

I shrugged and raised my eyebrows.

‘What?’ I said, confused.

The pilot’s son opened his eyes. The huge pupils shrank until they were pinpricks.

‘He carried a rabbit in one hand. In the other two birds.’

‘How was he dressed?’ I asked, more and more confused.

‘Like a man,’ said the pilot’s boy. ‘But he wears a cross on his chest and has another on his back that mocks the first – for it kills as the other saves.’

I was baffled. The image of this man – if man he was – was getting stranger and stranger, but I felt I had to try to make sense of it.

‘I’m sure you’re mistaken,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he was just a man like any other.’

The pilot’s boy frowned at me. He shook his head.

‘But why then did he have so many demons with him?’ he said.

‘Demons?’ I asked in amazement. ‘What do you mean?’

The pilot’s boy looked down and shook his head rapidly, and clenched and flexed his long fingers. I had seen this before. Whenever he reached a point where he did not want to explain any more, he closed his eyes and shook his head, and – as he did now – ran away, flapping his arms like a bird and squawking.

II

Though I knew the words of the pilot’s boy to be nonsense, they bothered me. I was still thinking about what he’d said when a hand touched me on the shoulder and I almost jumped into the branches of a nearby tree.

‘What has my young friend been telling you?’

I turned, relieved to see a smiling, bearded face I knew well. It was the hermit who lived alone in the oak woods that covered the hills thereabouts. He lived in a hut among the trees on a hillside by the sea. It was nothing more than a pile of sticks held together by honeysuckle and moss. How he survived there in winter, no one knew.

I liked him and would often seek him out when I had no work to do. He would give me some nettle tea and tell me stories. They were strange stories, and though I did not always know exactly what he meant by them, I liked his voice and I liked the way my brain seemed to quiver after listening to them, as if he had roused some part of it that had been sleeping and it woke, confused and restless.

‘I don’t know,’ I said finally, in answer to his question. ‘He talks so oddly. Why is he like that?’

The hermit laced his fingers together.

‘Some say he is a changeling,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘That the elfin folk took the pilot’s baby and swapped him for one of their own.’

I stared off in the direction in which the boy had gone.

‘Do you believe that?’ I asked.

The hermit shrugged.

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘He has the look of an elfin child about him.’

It was true. There was something other-worldly about his appearance.

‘I just thought he was crazy,’ I said.

‘Crazy?’ said the hermit, waving his hand in front of his face dismissively. ‘That word can cover many things, my boy. Perhaps he sees things that we cannot.’

‘But how do you know he sees anything?’ I asked.

The hermit shrugged again.

‘How would I know that he does not?’

I smiled.

‘I knew a man who went mad,’ said the hermit as he set off walking back to his home among the trees with me following behind. ‘He thought to himself that we are not really, truly, here at all.’

‘Not here?’ I said.

‘Not truly,’ continued the hermit. ‘His thought was that we were all players in another man’s dream.’

I frowned. The hermit continued.

‘At first it was an idle thought,’ he said. ‘We have all had such fancies, after all.’

I had never had such a fancy, but I kept it to myself for fear the hermit would think me dull. We reached the hermit’s nest of branches and twigs. A fire burned nearby and we sat down on a log beside it.

‘But gradually,’ said the hermit, ‘this thought took root, like ivy in a wall. It wormed itself through the mortar and slowly dislodged brick after brick until his mind came tumbling down.’

‘And what happened to him?’ I asked.

‘He threw himself from the church tower of the town in which he lived,’ he said. ‘He was sure that he could come to no harm because in truth he was only a phantasm in another man’s sleeping mind.’

‘He was wrong then,’ I said. ‘For I’m just as sure he dashed his brains out when he hit the ground.’

The hermit nodded.

‘He did,’ he said. ‘Most certainly, he did. But that doesn’t disprove his theory.’

‘How?’ I said.

‘Because perhaps the sleeping man dreamt a dream in which a man thought himself to be in a dream and in that dream he threw himself from a church tower and killed himself.’

I frowned, trying to take in what the hermit said. He laughed. But I was troubled by this line of thought and was not so easily diverted from it.

‘Perhaps we make the world ourselves,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we invent it all at every moment. Perhaps all things are dead until we give them life with our imaginations. Perhaps there are a million worlds, each one existing only for that one person and none other.’

I shook my head dizzily.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

The hermit smiled.

‘I shouldn’t boggle your brain with such notions,’ he said.

‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I like having my brain boggled.’

I picked up a twig that lay at my feet and held it to my face. It was encrusted with several sorts of lichen, yellow, white and pale grey. Some covered the bark whilst others formed a kind of forest of branches that echoed in miniature the wood we sat in. Worlds within worlds.

It was late now. Night was coming in and draining all the colours from the scene. The hermit’s fire glowed more intensely and threw our shadows on the trees and on the mossy woodland floor. What colour is moss at twilight? Not green, nor any colour known by name.

A nightingale began to sing in the trees nearby, its voice startling us both and then holding us in its grip for the length of its song.

‘Some say it is a sad song,’ whispered the hermit, as reverently as if we had been in church and the bird’s song had been a sermon. ‘But I don’t think of it that way.’

The bird let loose another burst of its song. And I had to agree that it didn’t make me feel sad at all. It lifted my heart and made the whole wood come alive, as though it had been waiting for the nightingale to sing.

‘The pilot’s boy says that he sees spirits,’ said the hermit. ‘He says that in the air around us are different spirits, good and bad. They are attracted to us depending on our characters. A wholly good person will attract only good spirits.’

I thought of the man the pilot’s son said he had seen, and the demons he brought with him.

‘And a bad person?’

‘A bad person will attract bad spirits – demons, the boy calls them,’ said the hermit. ‘And that must mean that there are many more demons in the air than angels.’

‘Is that why you live out here on your own,’ I asked, ‘because you think people are bad?’

The hermit looked at me very seriously.

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t shun people because I am better than they are. I shun them because I do not deserve to be with other people. I shun them as a penance.’

He looked away, deep in thought.

‘You don’t
really
believe he sees these spirits?’ I asked.

‘I do believe he sees them,’ said the hermit. ‘Whether they are there or not, I couldn’t say. And whether they have the meaning he gives them, I likewise couldn’t guarantee.’

‘Surely demons could only be bad,’ I said with a grin.

To my surprise, the hermit did not agree.

‘Perhaps. But perhaps we need demons to drive us to good things,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they are neither good nor bad, but simply some vital part of the world, like air or water.’

I frowned.

‘Come,’ said the hermit. ‘It’s getting dark. Time you were home.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, getting up. ‘There’s no need to go with me.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said with a smile. ‘With the air full of demons, I would feel happier making sure that you got safely to your house. Your mother would expect it of me.’

I smiled. The hermit walked with me until I could see my cottage and then I realised that he was no longer there and I turned to see him standing alone in the moon shadows. I waved and he waved back, then he walked away.

III

My home was dark against the western sky and bats flitted here and there as I approached, picking off the moths lured to the lamplight shining from the window.

I was walking towards the house when I noticed another light coming from the barn and, looking through the door, saw a man standing with his back to me, splashing water from a bucket into his face as he leaned forward. A lamp was resting on a barrel.

I stood there staring. He pulled his shirt over his head and his back was now bared. Written all across it in ink scratched into the flesh were all manner of signs and symbols – stars and moons and curious devices I did not know or understand.

‘Who are you, sir?’ I asked, as strongly as I was able. He turned at my voice.

He was a tall man, thin but with his muscles well defined. His face was long and handsome in a wolfish way. His beard was short and darker than his hair, which was wet and fell to his shoulders. His smile was wide and white.

‘Well, then,’ he said. ‘And who might this be?’

I said nothing. I was staring at his chest, which was likewise inscribed with pictures. There was the sun and the moon, a ship in full sail. There were coiling snakes and knotted ropes. There was a cloud with a lightning bolt, dice, a death’s head.

‘The pictures bother you, boy?’ he said. ‘Here, let’s hide them away.’

He grabbed his shirt and pulled it on over his head. At that point my mother appeared and I moved towards her stealthily; whether to protect her or be protected by her, I could not rightly say. The stranger laughed – and to my surprise, my mother joined him.

‘Do you not know me then?’ said the stranger.

I looked to my mother in confusion. She chuckled and shook her head.

‘’Tis your uncle,’ she said. ‘Your father’s brother. He played with you many times when you were a little boy.’

I did remember my uncle. Or at least I loved the memory of him and his laugh and his wonderful stories. But I couldn’t match that memory to the man who stood before me. My uncle seemed to read my mind.

‘I have changed a little,’ he said. ‘I have been through many trials since we last met. But then we all have changed over the past years, have we not? Apart from my sister-in-law there, who looks younger, and more beautiful if anything.’

My mother blushed – something I hadn’t seen her do since my father was alive. She slapped him with the back of her hand and he pretended that he was hurt and staggered back, groaning and clutching his stomach.

I laughed and he looked up smiling and opened his arms. After a moment’s hesitation, I strode forward and we embraced. I was suddenly overcome with memories of my father and had to fight to hold back tears. Again he seemed to sense what I was thinking.

‘I was right sorry to hear about your father,’ he said. ‘He was a good man, my brother. And they are rarer than rubies, let me tell you.’

My mother said my uncle must eat and we all went through into the kitchen, where the whole room was filled with delicious smells. I walked to the pot and took the lid off.

‘Rabbit?’ I said.

‘Your uncle brought it,’ said my mother. ‘And two pigeons.’

I thought of the pilot’s boy and realised now that my uncle was the stranger he had seen.