Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.) Page 5

  Entering the Tower had, in the end, been a simple business. The guard had looked inside the satchel, but only cursorily and without penetrating deep enough to unearth the miniature warrior concealed inside. Bates had walked into the Tower through the inset door, the flap a twelfth the size in the corner of the great gates. The great gates were not opened. Bates had hurried past the buzz of people within, over the inner quad, through another door and to a coign in an empty corridor. And there he had released the Lilliputian warrior, who had emerged from the bag with threads of rope coiled over his shoulder, and his own miniature satchel on a belt around his waist. He had not bidden Bates farewell. He had scurried off without a word.

  Bates had loitered, nervously, around the Tower, and then had slipped amongst a crowd of engineers and kitchen servants as they exited the Tower, and after that had made his way into deserted streets in Whitechapel.

  Perhaps he expected to hear some titanic explosion, the arsenal beneath the Tower exploded by the fierce little Lilliputian; perhaps he expected the cheers of French troops. But although his ear was repeatedly distracted by bangs, knocks, creases of sound in the air, yells, tatters of song, aural flotsam, he heard nothing that matched the imagined cataclysm of his heart.

  Much later in the afternoon, ashamed at his own manifest cowardice, he had ventured out from this house, and wandered the city. He came across one dead body, in a British uniform, and then a clutch more of them. A print-shop’s windows had been broken in to make a placement for a field gun, but the gun’s barrel was sheared and broken like a daisy, and its crew lay in a tangle of blackened arms and legs around it. Southward brought Bates out on the river again. Here there were more bodies. Bates went to the water’s edge and sat down. On the far side of the river ruined buildings bannered smoke into the evening air.

  There was nobody in sight. It was as if London were a mort city.

  The river hushed below him, a sound like breathing.

  I have killed my city, thought Bates, his mood flowing away from him now like the river itself, his spirits draining into the sinks of despair. I am a traitor, and I have killed my city.

  An irregular splashing to the west intruded on his attention. Upriver he could see one of the giants, sitting on the bank with its legs in the water for all the world like a small boy beside a tiny stream. The giant kicked his legs, languidly, intermittently, sending up house-sized bulges of water to trouble the surface. Behind him, the tip of the sun dipped against the river. Its colour bled from it into the water, like paint from a brush washed after a day’s work.

  With desperate, self-detesting resolution, Bates started towards the figure; this giant surveying the ruins he had made of the world’s greatest city. ‘Monsieur!’ he called. ‘Monsieur!’

  He ran for ten minutes before he was close enough for his gnat’s voice to reach the great flappy ears. ‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’

  The Brobdingnagian turned his head with the slowness of a planet revolving.

  ‘I am here, Monsieur!’ squeaked Bates. ‘Down here, Monsieur!’

  The eyelids rolled up, great blinds, and the carpet-roll lips parted. ‘Good day,’ the giant said.

  And now that he was standing beside the creature, Bates realised he had no idea what he had intended in coming over. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ he said. ‘Forgive me for approaching you. Is the battle over?’

  ‘I can barely hear you,’ grumbled the giant, its sub-bass voice rolling and coiling in the evening air. ‘Allow me to lift you.’ And with sluggish but minute patience the enormous hand presented itself, so that Bates could step into the palm. The quality of the skin was not in the least leathery, as he expected it to be; it was douce, though strong, with some of the quality of turf. And then he was lifted into the air, and brought before the enormous benign face. Bates could see the pores, a thousand rabbit-holes in the cliff-face; could see the poplar-stubs of unshaved beard, the tangle of hair in the nostril like winter scrub.

  ‘Thank you, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Is the battle over?’

  ‘It is,’ said the giant.

  ‘Are the French victorious?’

  Every flicker of emotion was magnified, as if the great face were acting, over-acting, each expression. ‘You are French?’

  ‘No, sir, no, sir,’ Bates gabbled. ‘But a sympathiser, sir. I am an ally of France, an ally, that is to say, of its great cause, of freedom for Pacificans, of freedom against slavery and the upholding of God’s law.’

  ‘Your voice is too small, and too rapid,’ rumbled the voice. ‘I cannot follow your speech.’

  ‘I am a friend to the Brobdingnagian people,’ said Bates more slowly and more loud. ‘And to the Lilliputians.’

  A smile, wide as a boulevard. ‘The tiniest of folk. Our fleas are bigger than they. Some of my people,’ he grumbled on, benignly, ‘do not believe they exist, never having seen them. But I am assured they do exist, and I am prepared to believe it.’

  There was silence for a moment. The light reddened deeper into sunset.

  ‘The day is yours?’ Bates asked again.

  ‘The army of France is victorious.’

  ‘You do not seem happy.’

  ‘Melancholia,’ said the giant, drawing the word out so that it seemed to rumble on and on, a sound like heavy furniture being dragged over the floor. ‘To observe a city broken like this. We Brobdingnagians are a peaceful people, and such destruction . . .’ He trailed off.

  ‘But your great cause,’ chirruped Bates. ‘This victory is a great thing! It will mean freedom for your people.’

  ‘The France army,’ said the giant, ‘possess a machine of the greatest ingenuity. I have seen it; no bigger than a snuffbox, yet it computes and calculates and solves all manner of problems at a ferocious rate. So swiftly it works! It is this machine that has won the war, I think. This machine. Its strategy, and its solution to problems. This machine.’ He hummed and hoomed for a while. ‘My people,’ he continued, ‘my people are ingenious with machines, but never so ingenious as your people. You are small, but cunning. Perhaps the others, the Lil, the Lilli . . .’

  ‘The Lilliputians.’

  ‘Just so, perhaps they are more ingenious even than you? The smaller the more cunning? This may be God’s way of ordering his universe. The smaller the more cunning.’

  ‘I have long been an ally of France,’ Bates declared. His spirits, sunken only minutes before, were rising again, following their own unfathomable logic. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps my betrayal truly followed a higher good. Perhaps it is for the best. After defeat, England will abandon its persecution of the Pacificans, and soon after that its greatness will reassert itself. In ten years . . . maybe less. And it will be a more worthwhile greatness, because it will not flout God’s ordinance. ‘I have long been an ally of France, and a friend of the Count D’Ivoi.’

  ‘D’Ivoi,’ said the giant. ‘I know him.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Indeed. Shall I take you to him?’

  ‘Yes!’ Bates declared, his heart flaring into fervour. ‘Yes! I will congratulate him on his victory, and on the new age of justice for Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians both!’

  The enormous hand cupped him against the giant’s shoulder, and he rose to his full height. The sun seemed to pull back from the horizon with the change in perspective, and then in lengthily slushing strides the giant marched down the river. He paused at the wrecked arches of London Bridge, stepping up onto the concourse and over it into the water again. In moments he was alongside the Tower. The troops outside the citadel were in French uniform; they scurried below, insect-like, apparently as alarmed by their gigantic ally as the British had been by the giants as foes. Cannon were hauled round to bear on the figure.

  ‘A visitor for Monsieur Le Comte,’ boomed the Brobdingnagian. ‘A visitor for Monsieur D’Ivoi.’

  He placed Bates on the charred lawn before the main gate, and withdrew his hand.

  [8]

  Bates was kept waiting for an hour o
r more, sitting on a bench inside the main gate. The evening light shaded deeper into full darkness, and a November chill wrapped itself around the skin. Soldiers passed back and forth, perked by their victory. Every face was grinning. Bates allowed the sense of achievement to penetrate his own heart. Something great had happened here, after all. He thought of the little warrior he had carried past this gate only that morning. Such valour in so small an individual! Was he still alive? When he met D’Ivoi again, he would ask. Such valour. He deserved a medal. Would miniature medals be forged, to reward the part brave Lilliputians had played in their own liberation?

  ‘Monsieur?’ An aide-de-camp was standing in front of him. ‘The Comte D’Ivoi will see you now.’

  Bubbling with excitement, Bates followed the fellow across the court and down a series of steps. Gaslit corridors, the stone wet with evening dew, or with their own cold slime. Finally into a broad-groined room, lit by two dozen lamps, brighter than day. And there was D’Ivoi with his absurd pigtail bobbing at the back of his head. A group of gorgeously uniformed men was sitting around a table.

  ‘Bates, my friend,’ called D’Ivoi. ‘France has much for which to thank you.’

  Bates approached, smiling. The generals at the table were examining maps of the southern counties. Around them strutted and passed a stream of military humanity. In the corner, somewhat the size of a sentry box, was an ebonywood case.

  Of the generals, only D’Ivoi stood up. The rest of the generals were still eating, and pausing only to drink from smoky coffee-cups as wide as skulls.

  ‘Bates, my friend,’ said D’Ivoi again.

  They were eating pastries glazed with sugar. The pastries glistened as if wet.

  ‘D’Ivoi,’ said Bates. He felt cheered to see his old friend, but something was wrong somewhere. He couldn’t put his finger on it. He could not determine exactly what was wrong. It might have been that he did not want to determine what was wrong, for that would mean dismantling his buoyant feeling of happiness and achievement. And yet, like a pain somewhere behind the eyes, Bates knew something was wrong.

  One of the generals looked up from the table. His ugliness was remarkable, the left eyebrow and cheek scored with an old scar, the eye itself glass and obnoxious. ‘Sit,’ said D’Ivoi.

  The air in the room was not sweet: close and stale-smelling.

  ‘I am glad that my small action,’ said Bates, ‘was able to hasten the conclusion to this wasteful war.’

  One of the generals at table snorted.

  ‘Did the Lilliputian warrior I ported here . . . did he survive?’

  ‘He did his job very well,’ said D’Ivoi. ‘Although, alas, the war is not over yet. The English are resisting at Runnymede, on the hill by the river there, with some skill and some force. But it will not be long! It will not be long, in part because of your labour. We, France, salute you.’

  ‘Ours is a nobler cause,’ said Bates, the words for a moment swimming his head with the thrill and honour of it all.

  ‘Cause?’ asked the general with the glass eye. It was impossible to look at his bunched, seamed face without one’s glance being drawn to his hideous eye. Bates pulled his gaze away, and it fell on the box in the corner of the room.

  ‘The Pope’s latest decree,’ said D’Ivoi, and stopped. He noticed where Bates was looking. ‘Ah, my friend, your eye discovers our most valuable ally. The computation device!’

  ‘So this is it,’ said Bates, distantly. The fact that there was something wrong was intruding itself again. ‘The famous computation device.’

  ‘Truly,’ said D’Ivoi. ‘It has brought us further, and faster. It will change the whole world, this beautiful machine. Beautiful machine!’

  ‘The Pope’s latest decree?’ queried the General. ‘C’est quoi ce que t’as dit?’

  D’Ivoi gabbled something in French, too rapidly for Bates to follow. His own smile felt false, now. The light was too bright in this underground cavern. It slicked the walls. Centuries of the Tower, a prison. The giants Gog and Magog, and Bran also. Was it not Bran the giant? Buried under Tower Hill, that was the story. Buried under the hill and the Tower built above it, pressing down on the enormous bones. A giant prison oppressing the buried form. How many people had seen the inside of this chamber, and never seen the light again? Centuries of people locked away, barred and closed and buried in the ground like blind stones in the mud.

  Bates was stepping towards the device now. ‘It is marvellous,’ he muttered. ‘How does it work?’

  D’Ivoi was at his arm, a touch on his elbow. ‘Ah, my friend,’ he said. ‘I cannot permit you to examine it too closely. You are a friend to France, I know, but even you must respect military secrets.’

  The box was coffin-black. It did not display any of its secrets on its exterior. ‘Of course,’ murmured Bates.

  ‘As to how it works,’ D’Ivoi continued, steering Bates back towards the door of the room. ‘For that you will have to ask Mister Babbage. It is something like an abacus, I think; something like a series of switches, or rolls, or gears, or something like this. I do not know. I only know,’ he beamed, and took Bates’s hand in his own, ‘I only know that it will win us the war. Goodbye, my friend, and thank you again.’

  Bates was half dazed as he walked from the room. A guard eyed him. He walked half aware up the stairway. There were certain things he should not think about. That was it. That was the best way. Bury thought, like the giant buried under the hill. Certain things he should not think about. He should not think of the French troops ranging out across the fields of England, of other towns burning, of the smoke rising as a column from the heart of the kingdom. Should not think of the blood draining out of bodies, tomato-bright in the sunlight. Should not think of giant men working to the extinction of their race at brute tasks, menial tasks, hauling logs or working great engines until their sturdy bodies gave out in exhaustion. Should not think of the Computational Device in the corner of the oppressive underground room. Not imagine opening the front of the device and looking inside. Or if he did think of this last, if he must think of it, then he should think of some giant clockwork device, some great rack of toothed-wheels and pins and rods, something wholly mechanical. But not think of a tight, close, miniature prison-cage, in which sweating rows of labouring tiny people worked at wheels and abacus racks, tied into position, working joylessly in the dark and hopelessness to process some machine for computation. Not that. He was on the top step now, and about to step back into the light, and the best thing would be to leave all that behind him, buried away below.

  TWO

  ELEANOR

  [1]

  Eleanor was eighteen years old when she learned whom she would marry. His name was Jonathan Burton. He was an industrialist. Her mother (seven years a widow) wept actual tears when she talked of it, as if perfectly overjoyed at the prospect. And yet Eleanor was certain her mother knew how deeply she was repelled by this Burton. How could she not? Burton owned a manufactory down by the river. He was vulgar, and he was old, and he was ugly. Worse, he was a mere arriviste: his father had been a printer’s devil, and his grandfather a servant - a servant! - in Derbyshire. Yet by his own efforts, employing the tiny Lilliputian men and women to make fancy machinery and cunning devices, he had become rich. And wealth, of course, brought its own privileges. Even at eighteen, sitting beside her Mamma in the open-topped clarence that they could not afford (but which Mamma continued to rent) - even at so early an age Eleanor understood that the economics of love were based on a principle of exclusive binaries. You might have a handsome husband, but he would be poor. You might have a wealthy husband, but he would be ugly. There were, it seemed, no other permutations of that particular equation. You might marry for the love of your betrothed and give up the love of your family; or alternately you might marry a man without owning a tittle of love for him and by doing so cement your Mamma’s love for you. This balance was what the mathematicians called zero-sum. Eleanor understood all this without needing to tax
her mother’s nebulous hypocrisy with question and answer. ‘He is a kind man,’ her Mamma said one Thursday, as they rode out in the clarence carriage.

  Eleanor had been thinking of mathematics, and was not paying proper attention. ‘He, Mamma?’

  ‘Mister Burton,’ said Mamma, with a fluttery intimation of displeasure in her voice that said plainly, Pay attention to me when I speak. Eleanor thrust mathematical thoughts from her mind.

  ‘Indeed, Mamma,’ she said. ‘He is kind.’

  ‘And wealthy. In the world of industry he is greatly respected.’

  Eleanor wondered how her mother could possibly be privy to the opinion of the world of industry. But she only said: ‘I do not doubt it.’