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decade older than his frame requires a little instruction, but then quite takes to the
sport. His comrade continues to reload your gun. The cartridge sack of feathered
corpses is shoved into my hands and I am reduced to the gathering after their hunting.
'Good, Lovegod!' the lieutenant tells her charge as we wait between waves of birds.
'Lovegod's doing very well, don't you think, Morgan?' You give a small smile which
may be assent. 'Pretty good for a wounded man. Show her your scars, Lovegod.'
The young soldier looks hesitant as he bares his shoulder happily not the one taking a
hammering from the shotgun and shows you some grubby bandages. 'And the rest;
don't be shy!' the lieutenant growls, half scornful, slapping the fellow on his behind.
The young man has to undo his trousers, dropping them to his knees as his face
flushes. Another thick bandage round one upper thigh (I had not even noticed he
limped, though now I think about it, he did). His pants look even greyer than his
bandages, and his face now darker still than both. I begin to feel sorry for the lad.
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'Close one there, eh, Lovegod?' the lieutenant says, winking. The youth gives a
nervous laugh and quickly does himself up again. You have looked away. 'Lovegod
had a narrow escape,' the lieutenant tells you, scanning the sky for more sport.
'Shrapnel, wasn't it, Lovegod?' The soldier boy grunts, still embarrassed. 'Shell,' the
lieutenant informs us. 'Could even have been fired by one of the guns we can hear
now,' she says, eyes narrowing, nose raised to the wind. The two soldiers look
puzzled and you give no sign. I concentrate, and there indeed, now I'm listening for it
again, is that distant, nearly subsonic rumble of the faraway artillery. 'Ah . . .' the
lieutenant breathes, as another blur of tiny birds rush down from the higher slopes and
circle in the air round the pool.
Several of the birds, only wounded. fall one wing fluttering, trapped in a tiny
confusion of fallen, blasted leaves to land near your feet, hitting the ground to cheep
and flap about with eccentric self concern, only to be stood on.
When you were younger, you would have cried to hear their tiny skulls crack so. But
you have learned to look away and inspect your gun, or with those strands of spent
smoke greyly curling against your worn up hair, break it and reload.
Ah, did I desire you at that moment; I wanted you for that night, unwashed, half
dressed, in a tangle of clothes and rugs and boots and belts, anxious by an eager, open
fire while that cartridge powder perfume lingered blackly on your skin and in your let
down hair.
It was not to be. Having granted me the status of hound for the rest of our shoot and
filling two sacks with the booty, the lieutenant orders me to an early bed like a
fractious child, on our return to the castle.
It was, I think, for my transgression. Between gun dog and child, I become briefly a
pack animal, ordered to carry the heavy, warm sacks of dead birds and a broken gun
on our way back home by the same steep route.
Behind me, the lieutenant talks on, regaling you with her life; another broken home. A
mean start in less troubled times, modest victories at school and sport building a
dawning self esteem and leading to a slow and self determined struggle up from the
rest of the herd. There followed a stint at some college then ~ with the coy hint of a
disappointment in love the decision to enlist, some time before the onset of the
present hostilities.
Tiresomely, then, one of those for whom such troubles are in truth a liberation,
providing the making of the individual character within the theatre of this greater
destruction; a contrarily minor eddy of creation in these fiercely corrosive times. Our
lieutenant's is a spirit freed by the re ordering implicit in this general disorder; a
beneficiary, so far, of the conflict. That which has dragged us down has buoyed her
up, and, in the castle, we meet, mirrored, and perhaps pass.
I might like to hear more of our captor's story, but seeing my opportunity I drop my
precious cargo. On the first bridge across the stream I slip and clutch at the damply
greasy rail, letting the bulky sacks drop from me, with the gun, so all the lieutenant's
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catch goes flying down to the rapids far below. The gun just disappears without a
fuss, its own splash lost within the endless foaming rush of that steep stream. The
sacks fall more slowly, hit a swirling pool and let forth their dead. The birds sail out,
the foaming water fills with feather, lead and flesh, and the wet birds water skinnied
even further float and circle and peel off and race away in that airy torrent.
I rise slowly, wiping green slime from my hands. The lieutenant comes up to me, grim
faced. She glances over the side of the bridge at the noisy, eddying surge below, as all
her booty speeds away. 'That was careless, Abel,' she tells me through lips like a grey
pink wound and teeth which seem disinclined to part.
'Perhaps I chose the wrong shoes,' I offer, apologetic. She looks down at my brown
brogues; reasonably rustic in aspect but with poor soles for such terrain.
'Perhaps,' she says. I do believe I am frightened of her, just for this moment. I could
believe that she is capable of blowing a hole in me with her shotgun, or putting a
bullet from her pistol through my head, or even just having me thrown over this
wooden parapet by her men. Instead she takes one last glance at where the birds have
disappeared within the rocky race and, in that cataract losing sight of them, has the
soldiers load me with the remaining guns. 'I really wouldn't lose those, Abel,' she
says, sounding almost sad. 'Really.' She turns away. 'Watch our friend carefully,' she
tells the man behind me. 'We don't want him slipping again. That would be too
terrible. Eh, my lady?' she asks as she passes you. We tramp on, and leave the river's
roar buried in its chasm.
I am closed within a high and unused room, a silted backwater in the east tower's
highest floor. Cluttered, it is, jumbled with all the froth of our living, like our fond
remembered attic. The small windows are mostly smashed, their sills spattered with
bird droppings. The fractured panes let in chill rain; I stuff some old curtains into the
spaces. In the cold grate I light a fitful fire from bound, collected volumes of old and
yellow paged magazines, some of them dealing with hunting and other rural matters;
it seems appropriate.
This theme continues. I cannot believe the good lieutenant memorised the castle's
every room on one tour round, so I conclude it is just luck that she has me confined
here, with these old journal collections, and in glass cases trophies of previous
hunts. Animals, birds and fish stare out, glassy eyed and stiffly posed, like awkward
ancestors in paintings. The cases are locked; I look for keys in vain, so force a few of
these glass sarcophagi, splintering the wood and fracturing the glass.
Regarding the stuffed fowl, the gutted fish, the glass eyed fox and hare, I tap their
hard, dead eyes, sniff their dustless plumage and stroke their strange dry skins.
Feathers and scales stay with my hand. I hold them up to the candelight, trying to see
their link, the time slow change from sea to air, from scale to feather, tail to tail,
iridescence to iridescence that these ends unravel back to, expressing evolution's
glacial, erratic continuity. The scale, so small, stays too great, however, and remains
unseen.
I throw open a narrow window over the moat and launch the birds; they fall. I heave
the fish out to the waters; they float. I suppose this is the extra element revealed; the
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