Shame and the Captives (36 page)

To the left, as he stumbled along, being outstripped in the rush to the wire by younger and less-marred men, he could see men torn by rifle fire and rolling on the ground or driven by the force of impacts into ditches on either side of the road. He was more exultant than affrighted. He had always been calm in action and rowdy only in victory.

Ahead, more young men tossed blankets over the inner barbed wire or prepared to climb over the bodies of those lacerated and wounded men who dangled from the upper strands of the fence. He had forgotten the disquieting, authoritative noise of machine guns, and was amazed how the men around them progressed despite that. The flash of a light weapon from one of the guard towers made more of the climbers sag, eternally safe. Now you could tell from the mi-nute discordance between their fire—the improbably short interval between a round leaving one gun and a round leaving the other—that the machine guns from both ends of the outer fence were in operation. He flinched but welcomed the fullness of sound.

He continued to progress at a fast amble, and looked left and right as other men passed him. It was easier to run towards one's culmination than to walk towards it, and he wished he could be faster. In looking to his right he saw Sakura, moving with a long stride, her head decorated with a fringe of fabric flowers and on her body an underlayer of full-bodied pink top and trousers, and around the lot of it swathes of bright cloth. She ran barefoot. Aoki thought for an instant she had debased the entire demonstration. A partially lame prisoner she passed patted her on her posterior as she hustled along. But then it became obvious that she meant to prove that her pretense did merely clothe a
he
, and the
he
was as willing to be valiant as any of the men who had never left behind their masculinity.

Aoki now saw Sakura as if she were a heavy garment slung on the wire of the fence. A machine-gun round that had borne away the crown of her head had left her suspended there, a great swathe
of vivid, blood-drenched cloth. Men were using her shoulders as leverage.

Aoki himself began to climb, at first by way of a blanket. An ultimate respect for Sakura's craft as a balladeer made him avoid the steps of flesh and cloth offered by her body. Higher on the fence, he hauled himself over the body of a young man who proved to be dying, not dead, and who groaned at the weight Aoki put on him. From the top of the fence Aoki looked down into the ground between this fence and the second. Below him men ran and wallowed and fell. He saw the silver of a blade with which one prisoner had cut the carotid of a wounded friend.

He climbed down backwards like a man descending a ladder, expecting the end and seeing other men topple from the top strands and pass him on their descent. He himself reached the bottom still upright amongst these others who had landed dead. A man he recognized was writhing in front of him. As a matter of etiquette, Aoki went down on his knees and asked the man if he needed a final mercy. He could find a knife, he said, or ask someone for one. But the man perished and another fell dead against his back before he had reached his feet again. Between here and the next fence, Aoki assured himself, I'll know what it's like, the whole mystery. He experienced the peculiar feel of air punctuated and knitted by machine-gun rounds, whose buffets made some men clump and, despite themselves, raise a hand as if the way ahead were not transparent to them or could be forced apart like curtains.

When he rose and ran again, other and better sprinters passed him and then fell down. He began climbing the second fence and one of his hands was spiked by a rosette of wire, and clothing caught and needed to be torn away. But the first of the escapees was climbing the outer fence and getting close to the machine gun now, and on the far side of that last wire fence, the crew was working at the thing to depress its angle of fire. These two seemed close figures, and the searchlight that had been a peril to the runners was becoming one
to the gunners, since it left them in their own vulnerable, busy cone of glare.

Yet firing in its new angle of depression and at so intimate a range, it was tearing the head, the legs, the arms off those climbing the last wire. There was concerted fire from the garrison as well, in their line in front of the company quarters. They know we want their magazine, Aoki realized.

He knew he had come through the zone of enfilading, crisscrossing fire, but for a second believed he was gone, that he had achieved the desired end. There was darkness before him, but sound continued as before. The searchlights had all died, he realized. Some calamity, which refused to overtake him, had overtaken the electrical system—a line severed by a bullet. The night ahead seemed almost dim, but it was still lit from behind him by the fires in the compound, and Aoki could see, like faces in a theater, the men at that great reaper of a gun, and the ragged line of garrison nearly but not exactly connected to it. It occurred to him that if the gun could be taken, it could be turned on the line.

He was astonished and chagrined at having got this far, and believed it was a symptom of the clumsiness he had expected of them. But as he dropped from the last fence, he was hungry for further acts of war now presented to him. A man was not aware of the existence of such hungers until he launched himself into the storm.

•  •  •

Cassidy fed the gun with a determined concentration, contemplative as a monk, excluding the world. But Headon at the handles knew that he would perish there, that when he had in his training looked down on the parts of the Vickers spread on a tarpaulin, he had been looking at the entrails of his death. The stand did not permit the barrel to be inclined any further than it was. And the garrison line off to one side had not seemed to have the wit or the education to advance and shield him and use him as their anchor. With so many self-liberated
figures now massing before him in open ground, he knew that after this belt there would be no time for Cassidy at his most adroit to get the thing reloaded. For an instant he tested himself for terror, probed the skin, but found that there was, above all, a certain anxiety there, different from fear—and peevishness. His fellow garrison troops were piss-poor, timid men, formed up by timid officers. It was in his mouth that he tasted the metallic, ashy, and utterly novel taste of his extinction. They'd take him seriously as a soldier now.

He knew there were further belts in cans on the trailer, and yelled at Cassidy to take them back into the camp.

“Bugger it!” Cassidy roared above the continuing fire of the gun. He was betting he could reload, but there was no chance.

“No, clear off!” Headon confirmed. If these interlopers turned the gun on the garrison, the garrison would not know how to take it. There were prisoners on either flank now, some falling to rifle fire but others not made cautious by it. This horde could be smelled through the cordite—the smell of their ambition and strangeness, of sour liquor and barbarous fervor.

Cassidy stood and, with a canister of belts in either hand, tried to jump over the prisoners' heads. It was an extraordinary vault, he thought, something he didn't know was in him, all to deny the belts to the marauders. His leg was pulled out from under him and he fell amongst them with a great thump that took his breath. These were his and Headon's recent targets. Why should there be any mercy in them? He could not see their individual faces and their shoulders blazed with the reflection of the fires they'd set. The sweatiness of their inevitable fear and strange ambitions encompassed him.

Headon took out the feeding mechanism from the gun and threw it over the heads of those around him, hoping it might find a clump of darkness to lie in. He could hear Cassidy screaming and pleading on the ground and the thud of baseball bats and the descent of knives.

A number of them were on the trailer now and one, standing in front of him, was a tall boy who drew his nail-studded baseball bat
back over his shoulder like someone preparing to hit a ball. Rather be killed with a cricket bat, thought Headon.

“Finish me quick, fuck you!” Headon instructed him.

Terror struck now, like a shaft entering him. He did not choose to fall but felt himself going. A tremendous, sudden, and world-ending wallop bore him away, his components of body and personhood flying apart along hectic avenues of yellow and blue light, tearing him away from torches and trams and sisters.

Cassidy, close to finished, bleeding from knife wounds as well as other blows, saw them laying into Headon's body with their clubs, and had the impression that Headon, draped over the rim of the trailer, was dancing under the blows, telegraphing agonies to him. Cassidy had time to see a merciless young man straddle him, knife in hand.

•  •  •

When Aoki climbed up onto the blood-fouled trailer, using the top of one of its tires to ascend, most men lay dead around it or had moved on to attack the line of the garrison, whose fire was more admirably concentrated now. A confidence and a bloody enthusiasm had entered them, and surprised him as much as it might—on reflection—surprise them. He saw some of his comrades sloping away north, having already and reasonably enough despaired of taking the magazine. He knelt across the legs of the pummeled corpse that lay half-in, half-out of the trailer, and inspected the gun. An essential segment of it had been thrown away—he could tell that at once. As well as that, the brave gunner, worthy of a better battalion, had hauled the belt crookedly so that the last few rounds had jammed. All the bravery of the fellow's soul had come together in those two acts of disablement.

“It's beyond hope,” he yelled to those still around him, who looked expectant and were waiting for him to turn the gun around and begin the business of damage beyond the wire. The rifle fire from the garrison dropped two prisoners as he spoke. All Aoki could think to do
was point the machine gun high in the air and tighten the clamp that fixed it there and jump down. He descended from the trailer and stood considering other options amidst all the havoc. Still bullets maliciously evaded him. Then, he decided in fury, you can outlay your strength in a search. He turned without haste and sloped away northwards up a slight slope to become lost amidst granite boulders. Others followed.

•  •  •

Goda waited in the orderly hut while around him the barracks blazed. He heard the machine guns and rifles, but only one runner got back to tell him some men had crossed all three wire barriers. So he set out, calling to any of those sheltering in ditches or prone on the earth—he could not tell whether from death or cowardice. His mood was somber. He caught up with the tail of the more southerly assault and felt again that half-forgotten peculiarity of advancing into machine-gun fire. He was aware of the surprise of impact that men around him howled forth, yet he remained unhurt.

Extraordinarily, Goda, much nimbler than Aoki, lived likewise and nonetheless through all the phases of crossing the wires, and climbing over blankets and bodies. He dropped from the last fence amongst shredded victims of grenades, which were being dropped from the tower above. He knew that if he stood still he might himself be so torn about, but then he saw men fall cleanly from machine-gun fire and chose that option. Men, as was natural in a battle, which this was more or less, were skirting the span of the gunfire and disappearing into the boulders and the darkness. And then the searchlights went out, and all seemed dim, but only for a moment for the eye was an adjustable organ.

Goda turned towards the garrison and got close enough without being felled to see both that the machine gun there was no longer in action on anyone's behalf, and that, as well, the garrison line had found its military regularity and discipline now, as a line might after
it has recovered from its disbelief in what is happening. The option which had presented itself to Aoki, to be gone and to cause disruption as a phantom in the countryside, was the one left to Goda.

Near the gate he could see the frightened faces of the garrison firing and emptying their rifles and searching for new clips in their pouches. He began to climb the wire just inside the gate, gashing his hand, but trying to retain his shaft with its knife blade in one palm, using only fingers for ascent. He was impelled by having seen the commandant calling to a signaler, and his malice towards that fool was illimitable.

He would have been discouraged to know that Aoki and Tengan—even though Tengan had been armed with a stake into which a blade had been embedded, and despite his stopping many times to howl defiance—amongst Goda's section of men in Main Road had been similarly and perversely immune; that there seemed to be a malign plan to save the council of three.

Like most of the men, Goda found his weapon inconvenient and threw it away. It had been hard to climb the three fences and retain it. Now he had only his own intractable and irreducible soul.

T
he young man who dropped ten yards from Abercare was someone he knew, and there was a second's lunatic impulse to greet him. This known fellow held a shaft of wood with a blade stuck in it. He ran purposely, and Abercare saw him coming too fast for anyone to be called on. The rage on his face looked like a mask because of his handsomeness. The fury there was both to be expected but also distorting. He realized this was the hubristic flier, one of the triumvirate—the young fellow with pretty features and astounding eyes.

Abercare nearly addressed him, ordering him to stop. The lieutenant had by now moved away, and Suttor, his pistol drawn, had turned back to support his troops. The signaler near Abercare saw the prisoner and reached for his rifle. The prisoner drew the stern of the shaft down, seemed to assess Abercare's face a second, and then drove the improvised weapon upwards into Abercare's sternum. Abercare breathed in hugely for a second and stood on in searing amazement with the shaft and its knife point fixed in him. The young man was visibly pleased but did not wait there to assess the damage any further. Abercare weighed the strange intrusion of the shaft. It was of a different order from pain, and larger.