Ironhand (21 page)

T
he Gunner was up to his neck in water that was filling the hole he had dug in the gravel spit. Now that he had moved the skeleton of the girl from where it had been blocking the outflow at the base of the water tank, he was definitely feeling a small current moving past his ankles.

He held his breath and submerged himself. Sure enough, water was moving through a low arch that came up to just below his knees. He closed his hands on the flaking bars that blocked it. They moved. He stood up and hacked at them with his boots. He kicked and kicked at the ancient metalwork. As he did so, he thought of the Walker’s sneering face and imagined his boot was pounding into the center of it. It allowed him to rise above the exhaustion that was sucking at him just long enough to make a space he might have a chance to crawl through. He reached down again and confirmed that this was so.

He scrambled carefully to the top of his hole and gathered up the bundle of heart stones wrapped in his cape. He pulled out his matchbox and lit a final match. The skeleton of the young girl gleamed whitely back at him. He had arranged the scraps of her dress over her as decently as he could, and he had covered her face. He looked at the long hair and thought of Edie. He remembered how pale and shaky she had been when she was separated from her heart stone, how the life seemed to drain from her and be replaced by an enormous, all-pervasive fear. The match guttered out, and he thought how scared Edie would be if she were left in a dark place like this, without even her warning stone for comfort.

He paused for a moment to reach into the scrabble of sea-glass in the bundle and picked one at random. He reached for the skeleton and found a shred of dress by touch alone. He tore a piece off and wrapped the heart stone tightly inside it, so no light would blaze out if the Walker were to appear. He wrapped it in several layers, because the main point of all the digging he’d done was to make sure that if the Walker used his mirrors to come back here, the absence of warning lights might make it impossible for him to ever get out again. The Gunner reckoned if he couldn’t see into the mirrors, he might just be stuck here forever.

He reached into the skeleton and placed the tight parcel of cloth where he thought her small heart would once have beaten.

“Sleep easy, little ’un,” he said. “He can’t hurt you no more.”

He grasped the bundle and dropped back into the hole with a splash. Even though he knew he could move underwater without needing to breathe, he didn’t actually feel that he could. He knew this was because there was a gap between what he was—a bronze statue— and what he had been made to represent—a man. The man side that had been instilled by the maker would go through all the agonies of drowning, even though he, as a statue, wouldn’t die. Although, since he was sure it was nearly midnight, that was going to be something of a technicality, as he was about to die as a statue for entirely different reasons.

He was going to do it anyway, he decided, since the point was to get the heart stones that the Walker so clearly valued out of his clutches forever.

“He who laughs last, mate,” he said into the darkness. “He who laughs bloody last . . .”

He grasped his helmet in one hand, the bundle of heart stones in the other, and took a deep breath. He ducked below the surface and pushed himself into the narrow water duct.

He kept his eyes open, but he might as well have closed them. The jagged shards of bar he had kicked out from the crumbling stonework rasped against the gravel in the pipe. As he pushed himself deeper into the pipe, the gravel spill thinned out, and he was crawling over a water-smoothed layer of slime on top of something that gave way as he moved on it.

As he pushed forward, he felt the acid burn of oxygen starvation scorching up from his lungs and tightening across his throat and gullet. His eyes bulged and his mouth began to strain against itself, the automatic reflex to breathe fighting the willpower he was using not to do so.

His teeth ground together, and he pushed blindly on. He knew in the part of his brain that was not occupied by the horror of the searing lack of oxygen that he was crawling away to die like a rat in a hole, but the fact that he was hiding the Walker’s precious stash of glass gave the otherwise futile gesture a point. He held on to that thought as his willpower finally gave in to the inevitable, and he reflexively opened his mouth and breathed in water.

And as he did so, he squirmed around and made his screaming body face the unseen sky above the ground, so that he would not die facedown, but looking upward. After all, since this was the last choice he was going to make, he wanted to look toward a place where maybe a happier ending than the lonely death that would come for him at midnight was possible.

T
he ground jumped as the bomb hit, and George was knocked onto one knee. The horses were pulling and bucking at their restraints. The soldier with his dad’s face was running across the ruined space, swearing as he looked up into the sky. He grabbed the Lewis Gun set up on a stand against a low wall and squinted through its sights as he knelt beneath it and aimed almost completely vertically.

As he opened fire, George found he was grabbing the horses’ bridles and pulling their heads together, automatically stroking and shushing them. His calming noises were drowned in the rip of heavy-caliber gunfire as the Lewis Gun rattled through the bullets held in the circular drum mounted on top.

George looked up and saw a yellow-and-black biplane turning overhead, so low that he could clearly see the goggled face of the spotter sitting behind the pilot as he leaned out and dropped a bomb by hand.

He had a sickening sense of the world going slow as the tiny bomb seemed to fall straight toward him; but slow as it felt, he didn’t seem to have time to run. Or maybe it was something else: maybe it was the impulse in the body that was not his, the Gunner’s instinct driving his movements. Whatever it was, he found that instead he was turning his back to the blast and protecting the horses’ heads with his outstretched arms.

The second bomb fell somewhere beyond the walls of the ruin, and though something smacked into the other side of the wall and made the dust bounce out of the cracks between the stone, George and the horses were unhurt. The Lewis Gun was suddenly silent. George looked over and saw with relief that the soldier was still in one piece, just trying to snap on a new drum of ammunition.

“Bloody spotter plane,” he swore. “We’ll be in for a pasting now.”

The soldier stared after the aircraft that was already a diminishing shape, heading for the horizon, and shook his head, sick at himself for missing.

“I don’t know why they let me waste rounds with this thing. Couldn’t hit a bloody barn if they locked me inside and made me let rip with a full drum of ammo.”

He locked off the weapon and turned to George with a rueful smile.

George realized that the soldier had been right. He was impossibly younger than George. It was his father’s face, but it was the face from photographs from before George was born and when he was a baby.

The soldier saw something on the ground between them and bent to pick it up from where he had dropped it on his run to the Lewis Gun. It was a thin pocket-size book with a scuffed red leather binding. Several black-and-white photographs had strewn themselves across the ground. George picked up the ones nearest him before the restless horses could mash a hoof on them. One picture was of a bright-eyed girl in a wide hat, smiling coyly to someone out of the frame, showing a lot of teeth and neck and shoulders and sitting in front of a potted aspidistra plant. Another picture showed the same girl on a chaise longue in front of a painted backdrop of trellised roses, holding a tightly wrapped bundle on her knees and rather awkwardly tilting it forward so that the camera could catch the bug-eyed outrage of a small baby being shown to the world.

“You see the horse in the tree?” asked the soldier.

George nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“Bloody shame, that. I mean, I’ve seen some things out here, but animals? I don’t know. This isn’t their fight, is it?”

George shook his head and then realized that the soldier was holding his hands out for the photographs he had retrieved.

“Sorry,” George grunted, and held them out. The soldier took the pictures and looked at them. He grinned ruefully.

“The wife.”

“Very pretty,” George swallowed.

The other man beamed proudly. “She should be. She’s on the stage.”

“Right.”

George was somehow limiting himself to short words, for fear that he might betray himself if he allowed anything as complicated as an actual sentence.

“She’s a sing-a-bit, dance-a-bit girl, really. She’s different, you know.”

The face that was impossibly his dad’s face crinkled in thought for a moment, and George saw something raw and vulnerable that he wasn’t used to seeing.

“I mean, I got pals think she’s a bit flighty, but they don’t know her. She just . . . likes attention. No harm in that.”

George realized that he was asking for reassurance, and he felt embarrassed at the vulnerability in the very face he had gone to for comfort.

“No.” He shrugged, out of his depth. The man looked at the picture with the baby. He coasted his thumb over the grimacing little face. He looked up into the sky.

“Maybe the nipper’ll be enough. Maybe slow her down a bit.”

“Maybe not.”

The words came out of George’s mouth before he could stop them. They sounded flat and rank and bitter.

“Yeah, well. If not, it doesn’t matter. We’ll have something good to show for it, eh?”

He waved the picture of the baby and then slid both photographs back between the printed pages of his book.

George nodded. His dad’s eyes found his.

“You got nippers, chum?”

The question took George by surprise.

“’Course not.”

“Takes you funny, it does. By surprise. It’s like this.” He waved the small, much-thumbed novel over his shoulder before pocketing it as he went back to crouch over the kettle that was now coming steamily to a boil. He carried on speaking without looking around. “It’s like a book, isn’t it—one minute you’re the hero of your own story, and then your girl produces this little atom and, even though he’s ever so tiny, everything moves a bit, and you see you got it all wrong—you ain’t the hero of the story at all. And what you took for the center of your own stage isn’t the center of any stage, it’s just a space on the edge of a much bigger place that was there all the time, only you didn’t see it. . . .”

His voice trailed off in wonderment, and for a while, all that George heard was the soldier tinkering with tin cups and the kettle and billycans. Then he turned with a face that was brightly smiling and so obviously trying not to be scared that it hurt George to look.

“But it’s all right, it’s good. It makes all this easier. I mean, it makes it lots worse, too, worrying and all, but you know even if some bloody whizzbang’s got your number on it, at least you had a speck of a hand in something that carries on, right?”

He held out a steaming tin cup to George. George took it and nodded. He took a swig and gasped as the liquid burned his mouth. The soldier seemed not to notice as he continued earnestly.

“I mean, I ain’t ever seen the little mite, not to hold, but if I was to stop one and never get back to Blighty, she’d tell him all about me, right? I mean, he’d know that I . . . you know, how much I—”

A giant sledgehammer slammed into the earth with an impact that knocked them off their feet, and the shock wave made George’s ears go momentarily deaf to anything except the sudden panicked pounding of the blood in his head.

His hands scrabbled down his body, and he was appalled to find wetness all over it. He waited for the pain of the gushing wound to hit him, but all that happened was his hearing slowly returned and he saw his father’s face looming over him as it fumbled on a tin helmet.

“Waste of good tea, chum.” He smiled and reached a hand out.

George let himself be pulled back to his feet and looked down to discover no red pumping horror disfiguring his torso and legs, just the dripping contents of his tin mug.

Another slamming impact hit the ground, this time farther away on the other side of the ruin. The soldier grimaced. It was such a heartbreakingly familiar expression that George couldn’t help believing this was his father in front of him. It was deeper than thought; it was flesh calling to flesh and recognizing itself.

“Ranging shots. Fritz has got us bloody bracketed. This is going to get hotter before it gets better.”

Astonishingly, now that they were in action, George saw that all the doubt and vulnerability had gone from his father’s eyes. He looked solid again, more like the dad George remembered. And then George’s body took over, and he was a soldier, not a boy caught in a good dream about to go bad, and he was busy comforting his horses as a new series of explosions began.

“That’s our mob hitting back. We’ll have to see if we can’t hit them before they plaster us!” his father shouted, ducking as something whirred past his head. “Call them artillery duels, but I’ll tell you what, there’s nothing gentlemanly about them. It’s kill or be killed and devil take the hindmost or the one whose gun-layer can’t cut the mustard.”

BOOM.
A shell clipped some of the remaining thatch off the top of the wall and left them ducking reflexively under a hail of dry rushes and plaster dust.

“And a happy Christmas to you too, Fritz.” His father grinned, a fierce light in his eyes.

The horses were bucking and pulling at their hobbles in terror, and then there was a sharp crack and a whump as something hit nearby. Something flew past George’s head, and something else glanced off the leather protector on his leg, kicking him hard. He had to hold on to the horses’ tack to keep his feet. One of the horses was neighing and shaking and trying to wrench itself free, and when George looked down he saw something smoking sticking out of its leg.

The sight of blood, the rising thunder of the barrage, and the nearness of the miss jolted George, and somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered that he could end all this by just stepping off a plinth in a city far, far away. It was a strong temptation, an instant ticket home.

He felt the shocked quivering of the horse’s nose, soft as down beneath his hand. He didn’t think as he dropped into a crouch, fumbling at one of the bags hanging off his belt for a field dressing.

“Here, give me a hand!” he heard himself yell. “Grab his head!”

The soldier with his dad’s face grasped the horse’s head and started trying to calm it. George saw himself reach down and grab the red-hot shard of metal protruding from the horse without a second’s hesitation, and he felt the shock of his fingers burning as he gripped on to it and yanked it out of the shaking leg muscle. As the redness gushed from the wound, he jammed the thick pad of field dressing over it and pushed down hard to stop the bleeding. With his other hand he shook loose the bandage and looped it around the leg, cinching the free end snug against itself as he did so.

He ignored the fact that the ground was bucking and heaving around him, and wound the bandage tight over the dressing pad, passing the roll to himself on either side of the leg until he ran out. As his hands worked, he noticed how very white the bandage was, and how well it looked against the deep chestnut of the horse’s leg. He inhaled the clean healthy smell of the wood smoke from the fire. He’d never smelled anything so good before. He leaned down and tore the end of the bandage against his teeth, and twisted the double end he’d made back on itself and tied it off securely.

The horse’s leg was shaking, but George was pleased to see the blood wasn’t yet leeching through the gauze.

“Good job,” said the soldier, smiling grimly down at George from where he was holding on to the bit below the horse’s widely dilated nostrils.

George stood up and put his arm around the horse’s neck, stroking and calming it.

Suddenly there was a hole in the thunder, and George and the soldier stood there on either side of the horse’s neck, still and waiting. George saw the horse’s eyes with extraordinary clarity, and thought he’d never seen such a deep and beautiful brown. Then he was distracted by something red, and his focus shifted to a ladybird calmly walking up the leather of the bridle toward his father’s hand resting between the horse’s ears. Beyond the ears he saw the sky, and he realized that it was not a pale white sky as he’d first thought, but a delicate blue that had an exquisite green tinge to it. It was as if the moment of silence and the fact that death could come smashing in from that sky at any moment was making him see everything more intensely.

He suddenly knew, in a kind of extension of this heightened awareness, that this was an extraordinarily precious moment, and that he had to take advantage of it before it was eviscerated by the next salvo of shells. He had something to say to this soldier who was and was not his father, more than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a never-in-a-lifetime chance that he mustn’t squander.

He turned to look into his father’s eyes, his mouth opening to speak, but the horse’s neck obscured his father’s face, and all he could see was an untidy tuft curling up and off the front of his head. As he moved to make eye contact, there was another explosion, not too close, but enough to make them both duck their heads. And then the shells began dropping all around them, and the day split open and hell blasted out in a thunderous series of hammer blows that slammed into the ground and seemed to suck the air out of their lungs as they clung to the horse’s neck and kept their heads down. Flying shrapnel and earth and stones blew past them.

This time, there was no more silence, just incessant noise and a relentless pounding that made the hard earth beneath their feet buck and roll like a ship’s deck in high seas.

George didn’t see much of the barrage they were stuck in the middle of. Every time there was an explosion, he ducked his head, and when he opened his eyes, all there was to see was the air full of dirt flying around. All he could do was bury his face in the horse’s neck, one hand clenched over it, the other rhythmically stroking it as he heard his voice saying:

“Easy now, easy now.”

The bombardment was shaking more than the foundations of the earth on which he was standing. It was shaking his grasp on everything. Every time he heard an explosion he flinched, and he knew the next one would be the one that blew him apart. When it wasn’t, the anticipation of the following one made him wish it had been.

Some distant memory of a plinth and the fact it would just take one step to free him from this hell again tried to make itself heard in the back of his mind as the endlessness of the horror took his legs out from under him; but he closed his ears to it.