Polystom (25 page)

His two lieutenants, on the other hand, had embarked on a two-month training process with the men. This began with long runs, through the forests and to the mountains, then back: the lieutenants shouting all the time, the men carrying sacks of stones in each hand. Each evening Sof and Stet dined with Polystom in the main house, where of course they were staying. They laughed a great deal at one another’s stories, laughter in which Polystom tried, slightly awkwardly, to join. Some of it frankly passed him by, and many of his own conversational sallies fell flat. ‘Do you two read at all?’ he asked once, to be met by blank expressions. Evidently they did not read. ‘Poetry?’ Polystom pressed. ‘There have been some superb martial poets, poems about
war. Phanicles himself fought on Bohemia, you know.’ ‘Phanicles,’ said Sof. ‘No, never heard of him.’

‘Knew a major called Palicles,’ offered Stet.

At dinner they might vaguely ask his permission for some aspect of training or other. ‘We’ll need to dig up a field, put some trenches in it, lay some logs. For the training you know. That alright?’ Yes, said Polystom. Of course. But their easy, almost insolent manner grated on him. Perhaps they were more experienced in war, but he was still Steward of Enting – they ought to be more respectful. He wanted to express this feeling, but couldn’t think of the form of words. Obviously he didn’t want to rebuke them outright. He didn’t want to alienate them. But, after all – he was the Steward.

The next day’s training saw the men out digging, turning the daisied turf beyond the airfield into a plain of mud. The day after that, the two lieutenants sent all the men to the far side of it, and ordered them to advance from trench to trench whilst Stet and Sof stood firing shots at them. Polystom came out to watch this exercise. His men were scrambling desperately out of each trench, running low and zigzagging, dropping to their knees and crawling through the mud, hauling themselves prone over the logs laid in their way, and dropping into another trench. All the while, the two offers were firing live ammunition at them. It looked to Stom, and presumably felt to the men, as if they were shooting to hit. They took aim, fired, swivelled the gun, took aim, fired again. One man was shot in the thigh, and without a cry fell back into the trench from which he was emerging. After the exercise, Sof stood over the man whilst another soldier, a man appointed corporal medic despite his lack of medical knowledge, bandaged the wound. ‘He can have five days rest,’ Sof said, loftily. ‘Then I want him training again. And he’d better patch the hole in his uniform. He’d better patch it, or his friends had better. Or he’ll be on punishment detail. Wound or no wound.’

‘Sir!’ barked the medic. ‘Sir,’ groaned the wounded man.

Despite the injury to one of their own, or perhaps because of it, the men were in high spirits that evening. Polystom, in his own house, stood in the Yellow Room looking over the lawn to where they massed by the sea’s edge, rinsing their mud-clogged uniforms in the water. Some were naked, some in longjohns, but they laughed and joked, splashing one another and larking about in the paling light. Stom returned to the dinner table. ‘I must say,’ he said to his two lieutenants. ‘It looked like you were having a jolly go at shooting them this afternoon. I mean,
actually
trying to shoot them.’

‘Trying to shoot
near
them,’ said Stet. ‘So they know what a bullet sounds like cracking past their heads. But it’s good practice to shoot one of them, in an exercise like that. Toughens them all up. Keeps them all on their toes.’

‘I see,’ said Polystom. He felt an obscure unhappiness pressing inside his solar plexus.

‘They’ll face worse on the Mudworld,’ Sof observed, pushing his silver knife through his fillet of trout with chicken and sourberry stuffing.

‘Have you seen action there?’ Stom asked.

‘Certainly have,’ said Sof. ‘Both of us. I say, Stet, do you remember the Pencil Ridge? That was no picnic,
if
you like. The enemy had dug themselves into the ridge, actually into the ridge.’

‘How they do it’s a mystery,’ put in Stet. ‘Why they don’t drown in mud and earth. But they don’t.’

‘So they had a troop on the top of the ridge, and we were ordered to take it. So we pushed forward with two hundred men, and got cut in half, fighting uphill you know and so on. But we took the ridge. And just as we were settling ourselves, weapons unready, ciggies out, didn’t they just pop up from the ground?’

‘They?’ asked Polystom.

‘Sir?’ said Stet. The two of them managed, continually, to
give the impression that they weren’t really paying any attention to him.

‘You said they just popped up. Who? Who do you mean?’

‘The enemy, sir,’ said Stet, as if explaining to a child. ‘Coming out of the ground, where they’d dug themselves in. Up they came, and cut us in half again. Only a dozen of them, but wild, and with that element of surprise.’

‘That element of surprise is a killer, sir,’ said Sof.

Sometimes, Polystom felt he ought to attend more closely to their conversation, and especially to their military anecdotes, as a way of preparing himself for war. But the impression of war he got from the two of them was that it was a giant playground, where kicks and knocks were of the same order as amputation and death. He didn’t much care for that version of war. He wanted to believe it something altogether more enormous, great glory, intense tragedy. Something poetic and beautiful in the terror and pain; something meaningful in the carnage.

The training continued: sometimes brutal (‘toughening them up’, Stet called it), sometimes merely gruelling. Polystom occasionally toyed with the idea of joining in, but his lieutenants dissuaded him. Best not diminish yourself in the eyes of the men, they said. You need the manner of command, they said, that’s the important thing. And you have that already, of course, sir, they said, possibly smirking a little as they spoke; it was hard for Polystom to tell. As Steward, you automatically have that.

‘Is there nothing I can do?’ Polystom had asked, a little plaintively.

‘Well,’ said Stet, tapping a cigarette against the back of his hand prior to smoking it, ‘you could practise your shooting. An officer can always stand improving his accuracy with the gun, you know.’

‘Rifle,’ said Sof, ‘and pistol both.’

‘Oh yes. Pistol especially.’

Accordingly, whilst his two lieutenants were making the men clamber up and down the trees, under fire, to retrieve parcels from inaccessible branches, Polystom made his way to a different part of the forest. He carried an elmwood box, like an attaché case, which he opened to display two perfectly crafted silver slot-pistols. He had had them made by a specialist gunsmith who lived on Rhum. Polystom levered them both out of their velvet surrounds, and then unhitched a layer of stiffened cloth from the lid of the box to reveal a layer of polished metal bullets, like fish-eggs crammed in together. It reminded him of a chocolate box. He fitted five bullets into each slot, and then turned the pistols over and over in front of his face, examining them carefully, their symmetry, their craft, their weight. The handles were inlaid with flat panels of teak, scored and crisscrossed with lines like wood engraved for printing. The barrels were straight and hollow like birds’ bones. The slot fed into the trigger casing. There was something delightful about the intricacy of the clock-like machinery. Standing with his feet apart, Polystom held both pistols away from him straightening his arm and aiming each at the trunk of a tree a hundred yards distant. A mutual clench in each trigger finger and the things exploded, a colossal synchronised bang, like reality itself splitting and cracking.

All around, birds flew upwards with an amplified shuffling sound of wings and rustling leaves.

Polystom had wrenched his left wrist with the recoil and, muttering curses to himself, he replaced the guns in their box and sat on the floor, nursing the jarred joint. For five minutes he wondered, bitterly, if he had broken it, but he seemed to be able to flex it slightly, and he probably (he told himself) would not have been able to move it all if he had snapped any bone. But it was hugely sore. Sprained. The stupidity! He’d tried to brace his joints, he really had. But now he knew he was facing the ridicule, howsoever
elegantly expressed, of his two lieutenants. How did your pistol practice go sir? Hurt your wrist sir? What a shame, sir.

With his good hand he packed away the guns and shut the case. Only as he was leaving did it occur to him to check whether he’d hit his target. Holding the case in his good hand, and clutching his sore arm against his chest, he made his way over to the tree. A portion of the bark on the extreme right edge had been splintered by the passage of a bullet.

He had Nestor bandage up the wrist with a splint of cured leather that allowed a degree of movement. ‘Try and make sure the bandages are underneath the sleeves,’ he told his servant, unable to keep the peevishness out of his voice. ‘Sir,’ said the butler. ‘I think it needs to come up over the base of your hand, sir, if it’s to do you any good.’

Supersensitive at supper, Polystom thought he detected sly smiles being exchanged between his lieutenants, but neither of them spoke directly about his sprain. They started on a lengthy military anecdote, swapping the narrative voice between themselves, their hilarity spiralling higher and higher as they proceeded.

‘. . . so the order comes down to dig out the old river bed . . .’

‘. . . although the mud is practically fluid, but nonetheless . . .’

‘. . .
digging
for hours and hours, but every spadeful slops back . . .’

‘. . . and then . . . and then the colonel himself comes down . . .’

‘. . . to see what’s taking the platoon so long . . .’

‘. . . and he doesn’t recognise
any
of us because we’re so muddy . . .’

‘. . . and he’s shouting and waving his pistol around, when . . .’

‘. . . plop!’

‘. . . plop!’ (They made this sound by flicking their tongues inside their cheeks.)

‘. . . he
loses
his grip on it and it goes flying
into
. . .’

‘. . .
into
the mud . . . disappears
completely
. . .’

‘. . . and how he raged! “Dig over here, now!”’ (A gruff, doggy voice for the colonel.)

‘. . . “you lot! Stop digging there and dig here!” ’

‘. . . “I want my gun back! That was my grandfather’s pistol!” ’

‘. . . “Where are your officers? I want them to report to me now!” ’

‘. . . “Been in the family a hundred years!” . . .’

Until they couldn’t continue because they were laughing so hard. Polystom smiled, leaning towards them, trying to get caught up in their manic hilarity, but he felt excluded from the game.

That night, in his bed, his wrist throbbing and keeping him awake, he told himself that things would be different after a tour of active service. That was the thing, he said to himself, that separated him from the younger officers. They had seen battle, and he hadn’t. Once he had been there, once he had purified himself in the heat of battle, then he would be one with all other soldiers. Then he would feel
real
.

That night, Polystom’s men were sleeping naked under the stars. The Autumn Year was practically at an end, and the nights were very chilly. The point of this exercise, the lieutenants had said, is to toughen you physically. You must be ready for every hardship. You will sleep tonight naked, on the lawn, under the chill night sky. We’ll be keeping an eye on you from the house! And as Stet and Sof slept the heavy sleep of the wine-sozzled, under their blankets, the mass of their men, acting without conscious decision, contracted and contracted, bodies pulling closer to bodies for the shared heat, until the whole platoon was a connected mass of bodies.

Polystom found it hard to sleep. He had nightmares. Most nights he woke, sobbing, from horrible nightmares.

In a week Polystom’s wrist recovered, and he spent long days alone by himself in the forest, honing his pistol shooting. He held one gun in his right hand, braced his right wrist with his left hand, squinnied along the length of the barrel and fired. Powdery clumps of tree-stuff spread and flew. The sensation of action at a distance was a very agreeable one. Once expected, the loud crash of the firing action did not startle, but rather exhilarated. He varied his practising from day to day. One occasion he would shoot trees, aiming for the dead centre of the trunk. Another day he would wait until a bird settled on a distant branch and then he would take aim at that.

His lieutenants had constructed a massive grid of felled logs which they floated out past the pier. Days of training now involved, it seemed to Polystom, the genuine attempt to drown the men. He occasionally came down to watch, but the antics depressed him. He felt a sick kind of sadness in his gut at it all. Playing at war. He was impatient now for the real thing. He wanted the charade-death to vanish, and real-death to come onto the stage. Was he really eager for death? He couldn’t decide. Partly it was a desire to remove himself from this home environment in which Sof and Stet could be so carelessly insolent to him. Surely things would be better on the battlefield. Then he would have actual command, instead of this courtesy title – a courtesy title that invited so much discourtesy from his lieutenants. Or, if not precisely discourtesy, then at least an unquantifiable lack of deference, a something not-right in their manner.

Their twin faces, grinning, as if sharing their secret joke. As if Polystom was the butt of their joke.

The last day of the year arrived, and Polystom held a Year’s-End banquet for all his men. On the
ting-ting
of
midnight, as the clock marked the transition into Winter Year, everybody cheered. Polystom gave a lengthy speech, not especially coherent, but his men cheered his every sentence. Before dessert was served Polystom was so drunk he couldn’t coordinate his spoon, bowl and mouth. Nestor, as discreetly as was possible with a figure sitting at the top table, crept in and helped him away. Carried him like a baby back to his own bed, put him into his pyjamas and left him sleeping. Polystom woke several hours later, into the chilly small hours of a new Winter Year, and vomited copiously, liquidly, all over his bed. The choking, gushing noises brought Nestor through, and servant helped master to the bath-annexe, washed him, dressed him in clean pyjamas and helped him, groaning and limping, to a new bedroom. The following morning he was too ill to leave his bed. Nestor brought him honey-broth at eleven, and he could barely keep that down. But through the open window, the chill fresh air touching his hot face, he heard Stetrus and Sophanes drilling the men in a jog round and round the house. Left
hep
left
hep
left
hep
jump! Left
hep
left
hep
left
hep
jump!