Books of Blood (23 page)

of mercy, but he went on nevertheless, choosing the suffering children first. Emptying the revolver, filling it again, emptying it, filling it, emptying it —Mick let go.

      He yelled at the top of his voice over the moans of the injured.

      ‘What is this?’

      The man looked up from his appalling duty, his face as dead-grey as his coat.

      ‘Uh?’ he grunted, frowning at the two interlopers through his thick spectacles.

      ‘What’s happened here?’ Mick shouted across at him. It felt good to shout, it felt good to sound angry at the man. Maybe he was to blame. It would be a fine thing, just to have someone to blame.

      ‘Tell us —‘ Mick said. He could hear the tears throbbing in his voice. ‘Tell us, for God’s sake. Explain.’

      Grey-coat shook his head. He didn’t understand a word this young idiot was saying. It was English he spoke, but that’s all he knew. Mick began to walk towards him, feeling all the time the eyes of the dead on him. Eyes like black, shining gems set in broken faces: eyes looking at him upside down, on heads severed from their seating. Eyes in heads that had solid howls for voices. Eyes in heads beyond howls, beyond breath. Thousands of eyes.

      He reached Grey-coat, whose gun was almost empty. He had taken off his spectacles and thrown them aside. He too was weeping, little jerks ran through his big, ungainly body.

      At Mick’s feet, somebody was reaching for him. He didn’t want to look, but the hand touched his shoe and he had no choice but to see its owner. A young man, lying like a flesh swastika, every joint smashed. A child lay under him, her bloody legs poking out like two pink sticks.

     
He wanted the man’s revolver, to stop the hand from touching him. Better still he wanted a machine-gun, a flame-thrower, anything to wipe the agony away.

      As he looked up from the broken body, Mick saw Grey-coat raise the revolver.

      ‘Judd —‘ he said, but as the word left his lips the muzzle of the revolver was slipped into Grey-coat’s mouth and the trigger was pulled.

      Grey-coat had saved the last bullet for himself. The back of his head opened like a dropped egg, the shell of his skull flying off. His body went limp and sank to the ground, the revolver still between his lips.

      ‘We must —, began Mick, saying the words to nobody. ‘We must . . .‘

      What was the imperative? In this situation, what must they do?

      ‘We must —‘Judd was behind him. ‘Help —‘ he said to Mick.

      ‘Yes. We must get help. We must —, ‘Go.’

      Go! That was what they must do. On any pretext, for any fragile, cowardly reason, they must go. Get out of the battlefield, get out of the reach of a dying hand with a wound in place of a body.

      ‘We have to tell the authorities. Find a town. Get help —‘

      ‘Priests,’ said Mick. ‘They need priests.’

      It was absurd, to think of giving the Last Rites to so many people. It would take an army of priests, a water cannon filled with holy water, a loudspeaker to pronounce the benedictions.

      They turned away, together, from the horror, and wrapped their arms around each other, then picked their way through the carnage to the car.

     
It was occupied.

      Vaslav Jelovsek was sitting behind the wheel, and trying to start the Volkswagen. He turned the ignition key once. Twice. Third time the engine caught and the wheels span in the crimson mud as he put her into reverse and backed down the track. Vaslav saw the Englishmen running towards the car, cursing him. There was no help for it

      — he didn’t want to steal the vehicle, but he had work to do. He had been a referee, he had been responsible for the contest, and the safety of the contestants. One of the heroic cities had already fallen. He must do everything in his power to prevent Popolac from following its twin. He must chase Popolac, and reason with it. Talk it down out of its terrors with quiet words and promises. If he failed there would be another disaster the equal of the one in front of him, and his conscience was already broken enough.

      Mick was still chasing the VW, shouting at Jelovsek. The thief took no notice, concentrating on manoeuvring the car back down the narrow, slippery track. Mick was losing the chase rapidly. The car had begun to pick up speed. Furious, but without the breath to speak his fury, Mick stood in the road, hands on his knees, heaving and sobbing.

      ‘Bastard!’ said Judd.

      Mick looked down the track. Their car had already disappeared.

      ‘Fucker couldn’t even drive properly.’

      ‘We have . . . we have . . . to catch . . . up . . .‘ said Mick through gulps of breath.

      ‘How?’

      ‘On foot. . .‘

      ‘We haven’t even got a map . . . it’s in the car.’

      ‘Jesus . . . Christ . . . Almighty.’

      They walked down the track together, away from the field.

     
After a few metres the tide of blood began to peter out. Just a few congealing rivulets dribbled on towards the main road. Mick and Judd followed the bloody tyre marks to the junction.

The Srbovac road was empty in both directions. The tyre marks showed a left turn. ‘He’s gone deeper into the hills,’ said Judd, staring along the lonely road towards the blue-green distance.

      ‘He’s out of his mind!’

      ‘Do we go back the way we came?’

      ‘It’ll take us all night on foot.’

      ‘We’ll hop a lift.’

      Judd shook his head: his face was slack and his look lost.

      ‘Don’t you see, Mick, they all knew this was happening. The people in the farms — they got the hell out while those people went crazy up there. There’ll be no cars along this road, I’ll lay you anything — except maybe a couple of shit-dumb tourists like us — and no tourist would stop for the likes of us.’

      He was right. They looked like butchers — splattered with blood. Their faces were shining with grease, their eyes maddened.

      ‘We’ll have to walk,’ said Judd, ‘the way he went.’

      He pointed along the road. The hills were darker now; the sun had suddenly gone out on their slopes.

      Mick shrugged. Either way he could see they had a night on the road ahead of them. But he wanted to walk somewhere — anywhere — as long as he put distance between him and the dead.

      In Popolac a kind of peace reigned. Instead of a frenzy of panic there was a numbness, a sheep-like acceptance of the world as it was. Locked in their positions, strapped, roped and harnessed to each other in a living system that allowed for no single voice to be louder than any other, nor any back to labour less than its neighbour’s,

they let an insane consensus replace the tranquil voice of reason. They were convulsed into one mind, one thought, one ambition. They became, in the space of a few moments, the single-minded giant whose image they had so brilliantly re-created. The illusion of petty individuality was swept away in an irresistible tide of collective feeling — not a mob’s passion, but a telepathic surge that dissolved the voices of thousands into one irresistible command.

      And the voice said: Go!

      The voice said: take this horrible sight away, where I need never see it again.

      Popolac turned away into the hills, its legs taking strides half a mile long. Each man, woman and child in that seething tower was sightless. They saw only through the eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but to think the city’s thoughts. And they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength. Vast and mad and deathless.

      Two miles along the road Mick and Judd smelt petrol in the air, and a little further along they came upon the VW. It had overturned in the reed-clogged drainage ditch at the side of the road. It had not caught fire.

      The driver’s door was open, and the body of Vaslav Jelovsek had tumbled out. His face was calm in unconsciousness. There seemed to be no sign of injury, except for a small cut or two on his sober face. They gently pulled the thief out of the wreckage and up out of the filth of the ditch on to the road. He moaned a little as they fussed about him, rolling Mick’s sweater up to pillow his head and removing the man’s jacket and tie.

      Quite suddenly, he opened his eyes.

      He stared at them both.

      ‘Are you all right?’ Mick asked.

     
The man said nothing for a moment. He seemed not to understand.

      Then:

      ‘English?’ he said. His accent was thick, but the question was quite clear.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘I heard your voices. English.’

      He frowned and winced.

      ‘Are you in pain?’ said Judd.

      The man seemed to find this amusing.

      ‘Am I in pain?’ he repeated, his face screwed up in a mixture of agony and delight.

      ‘I shall die,’ he said, through gritted teeth.

      ‘No,’ said Mick, ‘you’re all right —‘

      The man shook his head, his authority absolute.

‘I shall die,’ he said again, the voice full of determination, ‘I want to die.’

      Judd crouched closer to him. His voice was weaker by the moment.

      ‘Tell us what to do,’ he said. The man had closed his eyes. Judd shook him awake, roughly.

      ‘Tell us,’ he said again, his show of compassion rapidly disappearing. ‘Tell us what this is all about.’

      ‘About?’ said the man, his eyes still closed. ‘It was a fall, that’s all. Just a fall . .

      ‘What fell?’

      ‘The city. Podujevo. My city.’

      ‘What did it fall from?’

      ‘Itself, of course.’

      The man was explaining nothing; just answering one riddle with another.

      ‘Where were you going?’ Mick inquired, trying to sound as unagressive as possible.

‘After Popolac,’ said the man.

‘Popolac?’ said Judd.

     
Mick began to see some sense in the story.

‘Popolac is another city. Like Podujevo. Twin cities. They’re on the map —‘

‘Where’s the city now?’ said Judd.

      Vaslav Jelovsek seemed to choose to tell the truth. There was a moment when he hovered between dying with a riddle on his lips, and living long enough to unburden his story. What did it matter if the tale was told now? There could never be another contest: all that was over.

      ‘They came to fight,’ he said, his voice now very soft, ‘Popolac and Podujevo. They come every ten years —‘

      ‘Fight?’ said Judd. ‘You mean all those people were slaughtered?’

      Vaslav shook his head.

      ‘No, no. They fell. I told you.’

      ‘Well, how do they fight?’ Mick said.

      ‘Go into the hills,’ was the only reply.

      Vaslav opened his eyes a little. The faces that loomed over him were exhausted and sick. They had suffered, these innocents. They deserved some explanation.

      ‘As giants,’ he said. ‘They fought as giants. They made a body out of their bodies, do you understand? The frame, the muscles, the bone, the eyes, nose, teeth all made of men and women.’

      ‘He’s delirious,’ said Judd.

      ‘You go into the hills,’ the man repeated. ‘See for yourselves how true it is.’

      ‘Even supposing —‘ Mick began.

      Vaslav interrupted him, eager to be finished. ‘They were good at the game of giants. It took many centuries of practice: every ten years making the figure larger and larger. One always ambitious to be larger than the other. Ropes to tie them all together, flawlessly. Sinews . . ligaments . . . There was food in its belly . . . there were pipes from the loins, to take away the waste. The

best-sighted sat in the eye-sockets, the best voiced in the mouth and throat. You wouldn’t believe the engineering of it.’

      ‘I don’t,’ said Judd, and stood up.

      ‘It is the body of the state,’ said Vaslav, so softly his voice was barely above a whisper, ‘it is the shape of our lives.’

      There was a silence. Small clouds passed over the road, soundlessly shedding their mass to the air.

      ‘It was a miracle,’ he said. It was as if he realized the true enormity of the fact for the first time. ‘It was a miracle.’

      It was enough. Yes. It was quite enough.

      His mouth closed, the words said, and he died.

      Mick felt this death more acutely than the thousands they had fled from; or rather this death was the key to unlock the anguish he felt for them all.

      Whether the man had chosen to tell a fantastic lie as he died, or whether this story was in some way true, Mick felt useless in the face of it. His imagination was too narrow to encompass the idea. His brain ached with the thought of it, and his compassion cracked under the weight of misery he felt.

      They stood on the road, while the clouds scudded by, their vague, grey shadows passing over them towards the enigmatic hills.

      It was twilight.

      Popolac could stride no further. It felt exhaustion in every muscle. Here and there in its huge anatomy deaths had occurred; but there was no grieving in the city for its deceased cells. If the dead were in the interior, the corpses were allowed to hang from their harnesses. If they formed the skin of the city they were unbuckled from their positions and released, to plunge into the forest below.

      The giant was not capable of pity. It had no ambition but to continue until it ceased.

     
As the sun slunk out of sight Popolac rested, sitting on a small hillock, nursing its huge head in its huge hands.

      The stars were coming out, with their familiar caution. Night was approaching, mercifully bandaging up the wounds of the day, blinding eyes that had seen too much.

      Popolac rose to its feet again, and began to move, step by booming step. It would not be long surely, before fatigue overcame it: before it could lie down in the tomb of some lost valley and die.

      But for a space yet it must walk on, each step more agonizingly slow than the last, while the night bloomed black around its head.

      Mick wanted to bury the car-thief, somewhere on the edge of the forest. Judd, however, pointed out that burying a body might seem, in tomorrow’s saner light, a little suspicious. And besides, wasn’t it absurd to concern themselves with one corpse when there were literally thousands of them lying a few miles from where they stood?

      The body was left to lie, therefore, and the car to sink deeper into the ditch.

      They began to walk again.

      It was cold, and colder by the moment, and they were hungry. But the few houses they passed were all deserted, locked and shuttered, every one.

      ‘What did he mean?’ said Mick, as they stood looking at another locked door.

      ‘He was talking metaphor —, ‘All that stuff about giants?’

      ‘It was some Trotskyist tripe —‘ Judd insisted.

      ‘I don’t think so.’

      ‘I know so. It was his deathbed speech, he’d probably been preparing for years.’

      ‘I don’t think so,’ Mick said again, and began walking