Map of Saint Mary’s Loch, 2220

TITLE PAGE and DEDICATION

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EPIGRAPH

TABLE of CONTENTS

View of Dryhope Tower, 1820

Prologue by a Hero’s Mother

Dryhope Tower

BEFORE VANISHING from the open intelligence net Wat Dryhope gave me a printout of the next five chapters saying, “My apology for a botched life, mother. Do what you like with it.”

I put it on a shelf behind old encyclopædias. The title scunnered me. Not knowing it was ironical I feared that his memoirs, like those of ancient politicians, would hoist a claim to importance by blaming his failure on wicked enemies and stupid helpers. The words “a botched life” suggested something different but equally dreich: the start of Augustine’s Confessions where the saint prepares us for his extraordinary conversion by denouncing his very ordinary early nastiness. I loved Wat most of my gets so had no wish to read what might make me despise him. Nor could I burn his writing unread. I placed it in easy reach and ignored it for years.

One grey dank autumn afternoon two months ago I had fed the poultry and was snibbing the henrun gate when I fell down flat and took an hour to regain breath and balance. I have had several tumbles lately, each worse than the last; have also started recalling events of twenty, forty, sixty years ago more clearly than this morning or yesterday. Lying on the cold ground I knew that if not killed by a stroke I must soon join my daughters softening into senile dementia in the house where I was born. On returning to the tower I took Wat’s printout from the shelf and dusted it. After filling a glass with uisge beatha I began to read and finished long before nightfall without sipping a drop. Admiration for Wat had become my strongest feeling; also anger with myself for keeping his work so long from the public. Later readings have not lessened my admiration for the clarity of the narration and honesty of the narrator.

A History Maker tells of seven crucial days in the life of a man with all the weaknesses that nearly brought the matriarchy of early modern time to a bad end yet all the strengths that helped it survive, reform, improve. Wat Dryhope, like Julius Caesar describing his Gallic wars, avoids vainglory and self-pity by naming himself in the third person and keeping the tale factual. He also writes so cannily that, like Walter Scott in his best novels, he gives the reader a sense of being at mighty doings. Adroit critics will notice his sly shift from present to past tense in the first chapter. Like Scott he tells a Scottish story in an English easily understood by other parts of the world but leaves the gab of the locals in its native doric. This shows he wanted his story read inside AND outside the Ettrick Forest, and I have warstled to help this by putting among my final notes a glossary of words liable to ramfeezle Sassenachs, North Americans and others with their own variety of English.

Yet with all its art four fifths of Wat’s story is proven fact on the testimony of a whole horde of independent witnesses. The first chapter is not only confirmed by public eye records but clearly based on them. These records also confirm his account of the reception before the Ettrick Warrior house, his platform announcement, his talk with Archie Crook Cot in the third chapter, and quotations from public reports and discussions of the new militarism in the fifth. Open intelligence archives confirm the judgement on the Ettrick — Northumberland cliffside battle by the Council for War Regulation Sitting in Geneva, and the night of puddock migrations to fresh water in southern Scotland that year, and the dates and wording of the advert and banquet invitation issued by Cellini’s Cloud Circus.

I have also sent copies of A History Maker to everyone I could find who is mentioned in it. Only Mirren Craig Douglas (that bitter woman) returned it without comment, which from her must signify assent. Wat’s brothers Joe and Sandy — his mistresses Nan and Annie and the Bowerhope twins — the veterans and servants of the Warrior house — the sisters who nursed him — I who schooled him — General Shafto who took him to the circus — all say he tells the truth as they recall it. Only the account of his doings with Meg Mountbenger in the gruesome fourth chapter are not confirmed by another protagonist, and why should he turn fanciful about her when honest about others? Some critics say Lawrence’s account of his rape in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an invention by which a lonely masochist got public sympathy for his queerness. Perhaps. Nothing else in Lawrence’s story depends on that rape so he may or may not have tholed it. But after Wat left Bowerhope that morning only a sore carnal collision can explain his state when he was found by the loch side, and explain his remarks to his sisters, and his story to me, and his dissemination of a plague which withered powerplants in every continent but Antarctica. If still alive Meg is sixty-three. Should she reappear and deny Wat’s story let none believe her. She was always a perverse bitch. She was the first of my gets, but I never liked her.

So I bequeath A History Maker to the open intelligence, having added to the end notes explaining what those who ken little of the past may find bumbazing. For posterity’s sake my notes about the immediate present are put in the past tense too, since the present soon will be. Wat was a scholar and a fighter. His tale of warfare, love and skulduggery also meditates on human change. It antidotes a dangerous easy-oasy habit of thinking the modern world at last a safe place, of thinking the past a midden too foul to steep our brains in. Last week a Dryhope auntie asked me, “Why remember those nasty centuries when honest folk were queered, pestered and malagroozed by clanjamfries of greedy gangsters who called themselves governments and stock exchanges? I wouldnae give them headroom.”

This wish not to see how we got here is ancient, not modern. Over three hundred years ago Henry Ford said, “History is bunk.” He was a practical genius who changed millions of lives by paying folk to make carriages in big new factories, while getting millions more to sell and buy carriages these factories made. Having mastered the new art of industrial growth he thought intelligent life needed nothing else. By 1929 the big new factories had made more carriages than could be sold at a profit. The owners closed the factories, millions of makers lost their jobs and houses, and even some rich folk suffered. Ford, not seeing that his method of making money had produced this poverty, blamed the collapse of industrial housekeeping on Communists and Jews and said Adolf Hitler’s fascism was the cure. He was partly right. The Second World War let him expand his factories again for he used them to make machines for the American armed forces. He was not nasty or stupid by nature, but ignorance of the past fogged his view of the present and blinded him to the future.

A History Maker shows that good states change as inevitably as bad ones, and should be carefully watched. My pedantical lang-nebbed notes at the end try to emphasize that. They also emulate my son’s modesty by naming me in the third person. If any future reader learns what happened to my brave, discontented, kindly, misguided, long-lost son I hope he or she will add a postscript for the satisfaction of posterity. I am sorry that I will not be here to read it.

Kate Dryhope

Dryhope Tower

8 December 2234

MIST FROM THE SEA covers the hill where a small army lies surrounded by a large. Above the mist and beneath a multitude of stars the public eye hangs like a man-made moon. It is a crystalline globe with lights and appearances of people working in the centre, people whose faces expand hugely when they look outward. They record visions and noises, these people, and comment on them, but now the only noise is the hush-hushing of remote waves breaking on rocks.

The mist slowly brightens to the west where the sun is nearing the horizon. Bugles from under the mist sound a reveille, then come faint scratchings like the noise of many grasshoppers. “The third day of warfare dawns,” says the public eye sinking into the mist, “An hour from now the battle for the standard starts.”

It pauses among shadowy figures whose activity causes the scratchings. A sudden beam of light from the globe lights a fourteen-year-old boy, haggard and dirty with stained bandages round brow, arm and ankle. He crouches on a cloak which has been his bed. He is sharpening the edge of a short sword with a spindle-shaped stone. The public eye hangs close to his left shoulder. The boy blushes in embarrassment and hones on, pretending not to see until the voice says, “An Ettrick breakfast — not very nourishing.”

The boy strikes at the eye with the stone and topples forward on his face.

“A typical reaction,” says the eye, skipping sideways and leaving him in darkness, “From one of a hot-headed clan on the verge of extinction. Let us see Northumbria.”

The public eye vanishes and reappears floating up a slope on the other side of a fog-filled valley. Burners cover the hillside with cheerful dots of light and heat, each surrounded by three soldiers. One unhurriedly sharpens swords, one polishes shields and helmets, a third cooks a breakfast of black puddings fried in their own fat. Those who have prepared their weapons sip mugs of hot coffee laced with rum.

“There is an atmosphere of anticipation,” says the public eye, “But anticipation without anxiety, of anticipation tinged with (let us be frank) pleasure. For half a century these doughty Northumbrians have lost brothers, fathers and uncles to Ettrick, so where you and I see the one surviving clan of a gallant Border army the Northumbrians see — and who can blame them? — the remnant of a nest of vipers. Let’s hear what the commanders say.”

Five Northumbrian commanders stand on a summit, side by side but far enough apart to offer distinct views of themselves. They are old men in their middle thirties with small clipped moustaches, patient, far-seeing expressions and deeply scarred faces. Plain ankle-length cloaks hide their bodies, each with his clan emblem on the left shoulder: the Milburn football, the Storey pencil, the Dodds thunderbolt, the Shafto buckle, the Charlton winged boot. A dawn breeze shreds the mist behind them and reveals five shining steel poles thirty feet high, each topped with a golden eagle gripping a cross beam. From each beam hangs a banner whose slow flappings do not hide the clan emblem on it and the richly embroidered names of past victories.

“How will the battle go today, General Dodds?” says the public eye to the middle commander. Dodds looks at the air over it and speaks as if to himself.

“We’ll crush them. They’ve no food, no water, we outnumber them ten to one. We’ll have their standard thirty minutes after starting bell.” “You have lost a lot to Ettrick,” says the eye, spinning round Dodds’s head to show the wrinkled flesh and small holes where his nose and ears had been.

“More than you see,” he replies with a slight smile, “A dad, nine brothers, seven sons, six grandsons, five hands and three legs I’ve lost. No, nature never meant me for a swordsman. A commander is all I’m fit for and I’ve never regretted it more than today. I’d love a final chop at Jardine Craig Douglas and his brats.”

“How do you think General Craig Douglas managed his campaign, General Dodds?”

“Like a professional. His choice of ground might have led to a draw if Teviot and Liddesdale, Eskdale and Galawater had moved as fast as he moved Ettrick. But they couldn’t, so we’ve got their standards.”

(Here General Shafto gives a loud guffaw which Dodds ignores.)

“What puzzles me,” says Dodds, “Is why he should make his last stand there.”

He points a finger across the valley to an isolated hill now clear of mist. The Ettrick standard stands on the summit with the remains of the Ettrick army bivouacked round it. On every surrounding slope are the bivouacs of their enemies.

“If Craig Douglas won’t surrender — if he’s determined to die for his flag — he could have found a better den to die in than a waterless hill where we can come at him from every side.”

“Will you invite him to surrender, General Dodds?”

The commander-in-chief pushes out his under lip, sucks his moustache and says, “We’ll vote on it. Milburn?”

Milburn says, “He had his last chance yesterday as far as I’m concerned.”

“Give him another,” says Storey. Charlton agrees. “No harm at all in giving old Craig Douglas a last chance to surrender,” says Shafto with another sharp guffaw, “He won’t take it.”

“If that’s the case, Shafto, you give him the message,” says Dodds, grinning, “Pile it on as thick as you like, and don’t forget the bit about their aunties.”

Shafto nods, salutes and stalks off down the slope, a herald with a flag of truce striding beside him. Our point of view remains between them until they ascend the besieged hill as the Ettrick soldiers gather on the summit. Three rows of youths, the smallest in front and tallest behind, stand behind the standard in a crescent with its tips toward the approaching Northumbrians. At the foot of the standard Jardine Craig Douglas is General among his senior officers. The graceful speed with which this company has moved into place, the casual yet energetic stances in which they wait would seem theatrical to observers used to the conscript or mercenary troops of the historical era. Each soldier presents a clear silhouette from a different angle: arms folded, or thumbs tucked in belt, or hand on hip and other on sword hilt. Even the smallest and dirtiest soldier — he who struck at the public eye with his hone — has now the poised dignity of a commander in a painting by Velasquez. Only one lanky officer slouches near his general like a morose actor who would prefer to be in a different play. General Craig Douglas also has an eccentric aspect. In an epoch when most men are over six feet tall and most generals have neat moustaches Craig Douglas is a gaunt five-foot six whose bushy grey eyebrows, beard and whiskers give him a wild hobgoblin look. The Northumbrian embassy halts three paces before him. The herald blows a fanfare. In the following stillness a lark is heard. Shafto, speaking for all to hear, soon drowns that voice. “Jardine Craig Douglas! I bring a message from Sidney Dodds, commander of Northumbria. You have fought bravely and well — none but your enemies know how well — but today you are doomed unless you surrender that standard, a standard you cannot stop us seizing! You have only a few seasoned troops to defend it and less than a hundred juniors, half of them fledglings. Did you save your youngest blood till last to spill it in a hopeless cause? Surrender now and gladden the hearts of your aunts, sisters and sweethearts. Surrender now and speed the revival of Ettrick as a clan of fighters. Surrender now and lose not one atom of the admiration rightly owed you by the viewing public, your allies, family, enemies and posterity.”

“A kind suggestion!” says Craig Douglas swiftly and loudly, “And nobly said. What do you think of it, men? Will we give him that old pole?”

He turns his back on Shafto and stands with fist on hip staring up at the golden eagle above the slowly flapping banner. His question has not been aimed at anyone so nobody replies until he looked sideways at his tallest and most slovenly officer saying, “You are our thinker Wat — you read history books, have been to the stars, have turned down a chance of living forever. What should I do?”

“Give him the pole. Let’s go home for a wash and a breakfast,” says Wat loudly, “We can order another pole. Our aunts will weave another banner.”

“There speaks the voice of reason!” cries Craig Douglas, cheerfully clapping Wat on the shoulder, “The voice of reason and NOT the voice of cowardice as we who fought beside Wat Dryhope yesterday know. But war isnae a reasonable trade.”

He moves away from his officers, still staring up at the banner. His voice becomes quieter but more distinct.

“That old pole means a lot to me. I started fighting for it a week before the eldest of you was conceived. We’ve done well since then. In battle after battle we’ve conquered and won allies until Ettrick has seized standards from Wick to Barrow and taken some on commons as far south as Sunningdale. But today Ettrick is the only undefeated clan on the Scottish Borders — one hundred and eight of us, mostly cadets and fledglings — one hundred and eight hungry, thirsty folk surrounded by over a thousand experienced, well-watered, well-fed warriors. So my good son Wat says, ‘Drop the pole. Give them the flag. They’ll take it anyway. Nobody will blame us.’ That is reasonable advice and I reject it!”

He flings his right hand toward the flag crying, “That flag flew over us in the bonny days when we were many and strong. Will we abandon it now just because we are few and weak? Have we become so sensible — so comfortable — so unmanly that we can bask like lions in the sunlight of victory but flee like hens from the shadow of certain death? A heroic defeat makes brave men as glorious as a victory I think!” He points upward at the public eye which floats round the standard between him and his crescent of soldiers, but he looks to them as he declares, “There is the eye which will show the world how the Ettrick clan will die, will show your sweethearts and aunts how their men can die! I ask you to die with me so that our death will be viewed and viewed again to the last days of mankind and television and time! Is anybody with me?”

As nearly everyone draws breath to roar their support Wat yells, “Stop and listen! Listen to me!”

All stare at him. The public eye draws near. With a gesture which tries to dismiss it he says, “Yes Dad, we fight to show our contempt for death but we old ones have done that more than once. Remember the bairns, the fourteen-year-olds! This is their first war. Give them the chance of another. Send them home.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” says Craig Douglas walking into the crescent of troops behind the standard, “Let the fledglings he speaks about take one step forward.” In the front rank some lads glance sideways at each other but none move their feet.

“Come,” he says kindly, “Ye cannae hide from me! Charlie and Jimmy, you’re fourteen — I know my sons’ ages. And Sandy, Kenneth, and Alec are my kin among the Bowerhopes. Step forward, loons, or I’ll command each of ye singly. An auld bitch like me cannae have mutinous pups.”

Twenty boys shuffle forward. He smiles and says, “You were bairns when I brought ye into battle two days since. Now you are warriors. This is my last order for you. Go behind the Northumbrian lines with General Shafto. Return to your aunts. When your wounds heal join the veterans and Boys’ Brigade in the Warrior house where you will be the only officers. Review this war from start to finish. Learn from our mistakes. Teach the Ettrick youngsters how to avoid them. Prepare future victories to avenge the losses of today. Away with ye!”

Still the boys keep their places, some looking sideways at each other, some staring doggedly ahead. One raises a hand.

“Aye, Charlie?” says the General.

Do you think … if we fight beside ye … we’ll let Ettrick down, Dad?”

“I doubt it, Charlie.”

A renewed silence is broken by an older boy in the rear.

“Permission to speak, Uncle.”

“Granted.”

“The young loons ken the laws of democratic warfare as well as we. You were elected to lead us in battle. You cannae order men to retreat unless their wounds or characters make them encumbrances.”

“I agree,” says Craig Douglas gently, “Step back those who choose to die with the rest of us.”

The youngsters step back.

“I tried, Wat,” says the General, sighing and strolling to the standard, “But all my fledglings have turned into eagles. Will you leave me now?”

“You’re a waster, Dad,” said Wat glumly, “An arrogant feckless blood-crazy waster. But I cannae live alone among the women.”

“So I have reason on my side after all!” shouts Craig Douglas with a laugh. Everyone but Wat echoes it. Even Shafto and the herald are laughing.

“General Shafto,” says Craig Douglas in a voice cutting the laughter short, “Thank Sidney Dodds and say we will meet his men — ” (he glances at his wristcom) “ — in nine minutes.”

“Good!” says Shafto, grinning. He salutes and strides back down the hill with the herald. The public eye remains.

“Mibby I’m a waster, but I’m not feckless when it comes to strategy,” Craig Douglas tells his army, “We cannae win this fight, but we won’t lose it if you do what I say. I and Joe Dryhope will take the rear guard, Colonel Wardlaw the right wing, Archie Elphinstone the left. Wat leads the van with three picked men who take their cues from him. The outcome depends on that … No spying! This collogue is private,” he tells the public eye. It soars upward while the Ettricks pull on their helmets and form a circle.

The public eye is now so high above the standard that hill and moorland and armed companies are spread beneath like a map with streams of ants pouring across.

“Four minutes from now the massacre of the decade begins,” says a voice. “The day is mild and dry, visibility good, the ground in fine condition. General Craig Douglas said he has a strategy which will prevent defeat. What can it be, Wolfgang Hochgeist?”

“I cannot possibly say,” says another voice, “For I do not think it can be done. The remark was, I fear, a nervous one. The nervous Craig Douglas nature appears in all males of that blood, especially in Wat Dryhope, the General’s eldest son.”

“So what can Craig Douglas do?”

“He can form a compact mass round the standard and fight on the spot till the last man drops, but too many of his soldiers are children for such a Teutonic stand. The Scottish temper and steepness of the hill indicate a downhill charge toward a more defensible standpoint. There are three: Blind Ghyll Quarry half a mile to the west; a windbreak wood to the south; and to the east, where the sea cliffs descend to an old atomic power station, the most tempting standpoint of all — a long concrete jetty in good condition. If the standard could be got there a troop of forty might hold off a thousand till nightfall, but Dodds commands five armies and has held back three to block approaches to the jetty, quarry and wood.”

“The Ettricks are unpegging the guy ropes of their standard!” cries the other voice. “Where they aim it when lowered will give a clue. Here comes the umpire!”

A white airship appears between clouds overhead, a red cross on the side and fifty small aircraft fixed to the underside. From a porthole comes a vivid flash then the clang of an enormous bell. The Ettricks stay in a tight mass round their standard on the hilltop. Three columns of Northumbrians approach the hill from different sides and start climbing to the top in curving paths that leave no straight opening for the force on the summit to charge through. The company on the summit regroup round their standard which dips to horizontal. Ropes, banner are swiftly twisted round the pole, it becomes the spine of a central column with a short column in front, longer ones on each side and behind. Dodds’s vanguard is nearing the summit when the Ettricks charge from it and crash like a torpedo through Shafto’s column.

“Where are they going? Where are they going? Where are they going?” demands the public eye at an altitude which keeps the whole field of action in view. Among the soldiers below other eyes record the bloody strife of individual bodies.

“To the jetty by way of the cliff,” says Hochgeist, “But it is too far, much too far away for them! Hopeless!”

“Yet most of Ettrick have passed through Shafto’s men with surprisingly few losses and now run into Milburn’s ranks like a knife into butter! Dodds’s men on the hilltop are breaking formation and pouring down after them like an avalanche. The best the Ettricks can do is let their heels defend them. Their central column has gained the bottom of the slope and now pushes by the shortest way to the cliff top, why? They can’t mean to pitch their standard into the sea?”

“Indeed no,” says Hochgeist, “Their last ten victories would be discounted by the War Council in Geneva. Craig Douglas may wish his clan to perish on this promontory for sentimental reasons. I believe the Picts made a historic stand here once.”

“But his clan will be wiped out before they reach it! Craig Douglas turns with his rear guard to face the enemy and now he’s really in the thick of it! What a man! Look at the action of that sword! But the Northumbrians are overwhelming him while the rest chase and surround the Ettrick standard which is shedding its defenders like an onion shedding skins yet fighting and thrusting upward all the time with Wat Dryhope in the lead! And they’ve reached it — the cliff edge — what are they trying to do? Are they actually raising the standard for a last flap of the old flag?”

“Aha!”

“There’s hardly a dozen left!”

“Aha!”

“Why won’t they surrender that damned pole? What are they trying to do, Wolfgang?”

“Something very clever which has never been done before and which only a hopelessly outnumbered force in exactly this cliff-edge situation could achieve. I have underrated Craig Douglas. What a pity he did not live to see his plan carried through. But his nervous son may actually succeed.”

The Ettrick standard, wagging like a corn stalk in a gale, is planted a yard from the cliff edge by its last few defenders. Wat holds the pole while landward of him three youngsters grasp ropes which stop it toppling into the sea. An Ettrick remnant hack and thrust to hold back a Northumbrian throng whose main wish is now to grab these very ropes.

“Get a hold before you kill them!” screams Dodds from the rear.

“Now!” yells Wat. At once the ropes are flung aside and grasped by Northumbrian hands. The pole too has been released to a Northumbrian. Wat stands a pace away, eyeing him. There is a pause.

“You surrender?” screams Dodds from the rear. Soldiers round the standard, Ettrick and Northumbrian, stare at Wat whose great height and sudden composure make him seem the only man fit to answer. Though bruised and bloody he no longer looks clumsy. With a goblinish grin he shouts, “No!” and lunges at the Northumbrian holding the pole.

“The Ettrick survivors now assault the Northumbrians holding their standard!” says Hochgeist. “Though hopelessly outnumbered the surprise of their attack in this narrow space has made the four or five Northumbrians holding the ropes release them and … OVER SHE GOES!”

The public eye takes in a picture to be replayed in slow motion for centuries to come: a toppling steel pole tipped with an eagle, a flame-like banner unrolling behind like the tail of a comet, both going down toward the wrinkled blue-grey silk of the North Sea, then striking it obliquely and passing under with a splash. Half of the silvery length shoots up again at an angle then the whole length settles and finally sinks.

“Was that allowed by the rules?”

“I think so, yes,” says Hochgeist, laughing,

“Because the rules do not forbid it. The Northumbrians captured the standard in fair fight. It was they who let it fall in the sea after an Ettrick counter-attack in a battle which still continues.”

“Yes the Northumbrians have gone berserk,” says the public eye. “It’s an ugly sight, but who can blame them? After half a century of victories Clan Ettrick has drawn on a technicality so even if the entire Ettrick army is exterminated it retires unbeaten. Exterminated it will certainly be unless — good! There goes the bell for end of play. And now as the Red Cross aircraft descend on the field of honour some of you may want to switch to the banks of the Alamo for a peep at the big fight between the Tex and Mex sharpshooters; but I know many will stay with us here to learn the final body-count as the medicals get down to business.”

The Northumbrian to whom he released the standard was the first man Wat Dryhope had deliberately killed. In previous fights his blows had been dealt in the thick of things, as much for defence as aggression, but his lunge at the Northumbrian had not been parried. His sword pierced a heart below a bewildered face because his victim had thought the battle over. Weary and disgusted Wat fell to the ground, saw the standard topple past him, heard renewed screams and yelling. Wanting no more he rolled over the cliff edge after the standard and lost consciousness.

Later he saw seagulls far beneath pecking at something in the waves. For a while he thought he was looking down on his drowned body. Aches in every muscle soon dismissed that idea. He was dangling on the cliff-face over a partly solid and partly yielding projection. When his hands gripped it sharp spines jagged the palms and fingers. He groaned but held tight, trying to turn sideways.

“Is this the last of the Ettricks?” asked a face in a globe three inches from his nose.

“Fuck off,” he muttered, then yelled it with the full force of his lungs.

“Wat Dryhope, eldest son of the slaughtered general,” said the face, “And clearly a reader who likes the robust language of twentieth-century fiction.”

“Hello, can I give you a hand?” asked another voice. Wat wrenched himself round and saw grey rock split by horizontal cracks. His torso lay on a clump of whins rooted in a crack above a narrow ledge. Twisting his face upward he saw the cliff top a few feet above with a figure kneeling on the edge. It was General Shafto, stretching an arm down and saying, “Come on — let’s have you.”

Wat raised a bloodstained right hand whose fingers, he knew, could now hold nothing, but Shafto gripped the wrist and dragged Wat up and over the edge as he fainted again.

He wakened a minute later with the neck of a flask between his teeth and a mouthful of burning fluid which set him spluttering.

“My aunts say this stuff does more harm than good,” said Shafto taking a swig, “I don’t believe them.”

“Thanks,” said Wat and propped himself up on an elbow. Judging by the sun less than an hour had passed since Ettrick had lowered the standard and charged downhill, yet the only signs of battle on the moorland slopes were some gangrels collecting scattered swords, helmets, shields of the dead and badly maimed. Three or four groups of Northumbrians stood or sprawled in small groups awaiting transport. Departing trucks in the distance showed where the rest had gone. The hospital ship still hung between clouds overhead; all dead and wounded bodies except his own had been lifted into it. A Red Cross aircraft was settling on the ground a hundred yards away; he saw nurses with a stretcher preparing to come for him.

“You were lucky it was me and not old Dodds who found you,” said Shafto affably, “He’d have pushed you into the sea. He says you got that draw by a trick — a filthy trick.”

“He’s right. Attacking after pretending to surrender is warfare for weans. When Dad gave his orders we were too feart and excited to think.”

“You’ll feel better when the medics have put more blood back into you,” said Shafto, “Your dad was a genius. He saw a loophole in the rules and made it work for him. People are tired of the old strategies — that battle will be disked by millions. In a month or three you and me should put our heads together and see if we can work out other new strategies — within the Geneva Conventions of course, always within the Conventions. I want you for an ally one day.”

As Wat was carried to the aircraft he said harshly, “Am I the last? Are all the rest of Ettrick dead?”

“No no no!” said a nurse soothingly, “Fourteen are living and most of them can be mended. Your brother Joe will mend.”

“Good,” said Wat and wept, covering his face with his hands. The public eye floated above it saying, “Goodbye Wat Dryhope, a hero of our time — a brave, nervous, tricky hero obviously shaken to the core by what may be eventually voted The Battle of The Century, a surprising last-minute draw between Ettrick and the five clans of Northumbria United.”

THE RED CROSS put the dead soldiers into pure white vaults below their homes where useless things were made good again. Women who had most loved them washed the bodies, laying them neatly between their belongings and the weapons and armour returned by the gangrels. Later the whole family came down for a last visit. Sisters, nieces, aunts wept and clasped each other. Children mooned around looking woeful or puzzled until grannies helped them choose an instrument, ornament or video to remind them of a favourite brother or uncle. The living left and the vault was sealed. Clear liquid welled from the floor until it covered everything inside. The liquid turned black and frothy like Irish stout, sank back through the floor into the roots of the powerplant and left the vault perfectly empty and clean.

On the day after the funeral a morning service was held in the stalk room of Dryhope house. Smooth, milk-white and six feet wide the stalk grew like a tree from the floor and out through the ceiling. All who remained of the family were gathered round it except three members of the Boys’ Brigade: these were at the Warrior house watching replays of the recent war with other junior cadets. In a few days they would return with solemn faces and expectations of being more thoroughly served by women, but now their sisters, aunts and grannies sprawled, reclined or squatted about the floor on rugs and large cushions. The four greatest great-grandmothers were enthroned in chairs. The only two adult males also had raised seats. Joe, smoking a good cigar, lay in a wheelchair with attachments supporting the stumps of an arm and leg. Wat, lightly bandaged, sprawled on a chaise longue.

A stately woman of fifty was mother that day and stood at a crystalline table, the top patterned with coloured points of light which flowed from her finger-tips and continually changed as she played a Sanctus which had preceded the miracle of transubstantiation for centuries before. The Sanctus ended and two sturdy girls of twelve stood facing her, one on each side of the stalk. Silencing the organ she attended to the orders of the day. Nurses asked for flasks of cell serum and protein to help the growth of Joe’s new arm and leg, an ointment to ease Granny Tibs’s rheumatic knee, and Elastoplast for the medical chest. The mother struck the organ. With a low humming the objects appeared as diagrams on the stalk, each inside a circle. There were clicks, twangs and gurgles as the outlines received colour and tone. With sharp detonations the images became solid things in round cavities. The acolytes lifted them out and gave them to the nurses. With heavy thuds the cavities became grey blotches which faded from the stalk leaving it an unblemished, delicate shade of palest pink. The mother had made the sound sequence easier on the ear by blending it with chords from the Agnus Dei by Carver, Palestrina, Bach and Berlioz, covering the last thuds with a loud Amen which faded with the blotches fading from the stalk.

Then the teachers ordered disks, paper, pencils, paint; the cooks milk, cheese, flour, sugar, coffee beans; the henwife ordered a sack of meal, a sack of corn, a first edition of Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus; the joiner ordered parts for a new orthopaedic bed she was making for Joe; weavers and embroiderers asked for many different colours of yarn and silk. When all were delivered the stalk was flushed rose red, a throbbing was heard from the underground roots and the room was colder, sure signs of plant exhaustion.

“A light order now,” said the mother. “Granny Tibs?”

Granny Tibs was one hundred and twenty and ordered a doll for her two-year-old great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. It had to be exactly like a doll she remembered playing with herself at that age, a china girl doll with curly yellow hair, blue eyes, a matching silk dress with a big bow at the back. When the diagram appeared she remembered that the hair had not been curly but smooth, and twisted in two long plaits tied with bows at the ends. The dress had also been of a historical kind called dirndl worn by the women of Bolivia or California — that should be a clue — the dress was illustrated in a book called Heidi Grows Up which had been published she thought in the eighteenth or perhaps nineteenth century. The doll was also made of cloth, not china at all. It took a long time to get exactly the doll Granny Tibs remembered and by then the colour of the stalk and temperature of the room were normal again. The children now spoke out. A young jeweller wanted two hundred grammes of silver wire and was persuaded to accept a hundred of copper. A young sculptor who asked for six kilogrammes of clay was told to collect it from Mountbenger where some aunts had a pottery; she said she hated Mountbenger because of a boy there, so was given a four-page geological guide to help her find her own supply of clay. A very young wood-worker wanted a sharp new chisel but the joiner said she would show him how to sharpen his old one. This answer caused outcries which the mother drowned with a blast of cheery sound.

Finally she faced the men and said, “Cigars, Joe?”

“I’ve all I need, Auntie,” he answered, blowing a smoke ring. She said, “Wat, you have a wanting look.”

“Have I? Then give me something that stops memories.”

“You can have Paxil, Zoloft, or Prozac, Gilbey’s London gin, The Macallan, Courvoisier or a thousand other derivatives of alcohol, opium and cocaine.”

“I want nothing that changes my chemistry,” he said coldly, “Give me a history book — not a statistical one — a book that reads like somebody talking.”

“What period?”

“A period of excitement when folk thought they were making a better world.”

Only the mother looked straight at Wat but a new alertness in the room seemed shared by everyone except the boys, the oldest great-granny, Kittock the henwife and, apparently, Joe.

“There were many such times,” said the mother. She pressed the organ and a table of names and dates flowed onto the stalk.

“The foundation of Israel, A.D. or B.C.?” she suggested, “The rise of Islam? Children’s Crusade? Peasants’ Revolt? French Revolution? More books have been written about each than there are brands of alcohol.”

There was a silence in which Wat reddened with embarrassment. Everyone seemed to be watching him. A calm, monotonous yet oddly sing-song voice said, “Have you read Ten Days That Shook the World, Wat?”

Kittock the henwife had spoken without lifting her eyes from the novel on her lap.

“Never,” said Wat thankfully.

“Well, that’s the book for you.”

So Wat ordered Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed’s account of Muscovite politics in 1917. The plant substantiated it. A girl gave it to him.

“Come outside, Wat” said Joe setting his chair in motion, “I need to see some hills.”

Wat started following but paused when the mother said, “Wat, you have lost a father, brothers, friends. We have lost brothers, lovers and sons in a war we never wanted.”

“I pity you of course,” said Wat, shrugging,

“But a circus will be here in a few days. Men will be coming from all over Scotland and even farther. Make the most of them.”

He strode out.

On this sunny spring day the projecting eaves of Dryhope house neatly shadowed the surrounding veranda. Joe sat here watching the view with the intense frown of a starving man who cannot quite believe in the meal before him. From under the veranda a flow of pure water fed a series of pools linked by waterfalls. The nearest held trout and cresses and a marble bird table shaped like a twentieth-century aircraft carrier. The second was a play-pool where infants splashed and shouted in sight of two ten-year-old aunts who lay gossiping on a nearby lawn. The third was a fishpond in a vegetable garden stretching all round the house. The last was a duckpond from which Dryhope burn flowed down through a glen planted with fruit trees and berry bushes. On the right bank stood Dryhope Tower, an ancient keep used by the henwife. A steepening of the hillside hid land immediately beyond but not Saint Mary’s Loch half a mile away. Today the calm surface exactly reflected the high surrounding hills with woods of pine, oak, birk, rowan, reflected also three houses by the shore. Oxcleuch, Cappercleuch and Bowerhope resembled Dryhope: large, low-walled, broad-eaved mansions, each with the slim white inverted cone of a powerplant stalk growing dim and invisible after the first hundred feet. The summits appeared at cloud level, each a disc of bright vapour from which a line of vapour flowed east with the wind. More than fifty such discs patterned the sky. The remotest over powerplants in Moffat, Eskdale and Teviot, looked like tiny flecks in the wedges of blue air between the hills. Lines of vapour from these and many more in the west ruled the heavenly blue into parallel strips. The lines were more emphatic today, as always after big funerals.

Joe pointed to the view with his only foot and said wistfully, “There’s a lot of goodness out there.”

“But ye cannae feel it,” said Wat, who sat cross-egged and reading on a rug beside him.

“No yet.”

“Maybe you’ll never feel part of that goodness again. I lost the feeling with my first battle.”

“Pessimist. I’m no like you. I’ll feel as good as ever when I get back my arm and leg.”

Joe glanced wistfully down at the crystalline cylinders extending from his right shoulder and right thigh. Tiny atomic motors among the pinkish-brown broth inside were nudging together cells of new limbs, but a month would pass before outlines of bones appeared. Joe sighed then said, “You made them very tense in there. You should keep ill-sounding words for me or the Warrior house.”

“Dryhope women are stupid,” said Wat coldly,

“They think I’m mourning the Dad — that daft old prick.”

“It should be possible for you to mourn the Dad,” said Joe gently, “I’m mourning him and he loved you most, loved you more than anyone because you’re our bonniest fighter and always argle-bargled with him. He liked contention. Are you mourning the bairns?”

“Rage not sorrow is my disease. Why did our fucking old progenitor con nearly all Ettrick into dying round a pole with a tin chicken on top? Why did he want us to fight after the decent chiefs of Teviot and Eskdale, Liddesdale and Galawater had surrendered? I’ll tell you why. He was past his prime and knew he was fighting his last war. He wanted to take our whole army into the roots with him. Our bairns were slaughtered because our Dad feared age and loneliness.”

“He made sure we’ll be remembered! The lot of us! Living and dead!” said Joe with a small firm smile, “The bairns too, in fact the bairns most of all. ‘All my fledglings have turned into eagles,’ he said. O he was right. Wee lads of fourteen have never chosen to die like that before — not since the dawn of television. If history wasnae a thing of the past I would say Ettrick made it two days ago. The strategy was the Dad’s but only you had the spunk to get the standard to the cliff top and kill the man you passed it to … What’s wrong?”

“I’m remembering his face,” muttered Wat after a moment. He had dropped his book and was biting his nails. Joe said softly, “A cigar?” and offered one.

“No.”

After a minute of silence Joe said mildly, “You’re wrong about Dad wanting us all to go out with him. He saved me by falling on me when Dodds’s butchers were hacking us both, that was no accident. But nothing you say upsets me, Wat — you arenae normal. You’re a hero. I’m proud of what you did. And I don’t care if all this …” (he waved his only hand at the view) “… never seems sweet to me again. Pride will keep me going, like it keeps you.”

He looked down at Wat who was reading again, or pretending to. Joe said, “How can a soldier who thinks our last war too bloody forget it by reading about dark ages when men fought wars without rules, and burned bombed looted peaceful houses, and killed raped enslaved whole families of women children and old ones — and boasted about it in their filthy newspapers! I hated history when I was wee. When Granny Pringle showed us films from those days I had nightmares.”

“I’m reading about folk who struggled to stop all that,” said Wat, “They were the greatest heroes.”

“Well, mibby, but it was the powerplants that stopped all that.”

For a while the only sounds were sparrows twittering on the bird table, infant shouts and splashes, a dull distant boom from Oxcleuch where something metallic was being synthesized. Joe said, “How would you like to die, Wat, if not in a battle folk would replay for centuries?”

“By heart failure while weeding a cabbage patch.”

“Aye, only dafties despise gardening,” said Joe thoughtfully, “But soldiers like us have no patience for it.”

Wat pocketed his book and stood up.

“You’re no fool, Joe,” he said, “You’re also brave, honest and good-natured so you’ll be our next general.”

“Me? General Joe of Ettrick? Why not General Wat?” said Joe grinning shyly, “You’re our hero.”

“I’m moody — a Hamlet type — good for sudden sprints and useless in the long run. I’ll go now.”

“Aye, a ride will help ye relax. Arrange one for me.”

Wat went down to the lawn, showed the larger of the little aunts his bandaged palms and said politely, “Lend me your hands Auntie Jean, these arenae much use.”

She jumped happily up and trotted beside him through an orchard with beehives under the trees. They entered a stable with a backdoor onto the common on the far side of the deer fence and went through it, collecting saddle, bridle, sugar lumps and whistle from the tackroom. On the common several horses grazed within sight of a water trough.

“I need an experienced old pony,” said Wat,

“Sophia will do.”

He blew three notes on the whistle. A sedate dapple grey with long mane and tail moved nearer without ceasing to crop grass.

“I know where you’re going! I know where you’re going!” shouted Auntie Jean excitedly. Wat threw the saddle onto the pony, offered it sugar and held the head while Jean’s strong little hands slipped on the bridle and tightened buckles on that and the girths. Wat inspected the buckles, set foot in stirrup, thrust most of himself over the pony’s back and with some groaning arrived upright in the saddle.

“I’ll lead you!” shouted Jean skipping about,

“I’ll lead you to all the randy aunties of Craig Douglas!”

“You willnae,” said Wat, “Give me those.”

With a pout of annoyance she handed up the reins. He gripped them clumsily with his thumbs and said, “You don’t know where I’m going, Jean. Clap her and goodbye.”

Jean turned the pony to face east and downhill and clapped her rump. Sophia, liking her rider, set off briskly although he turned her uphill and north.

By easy slopes he headed for Hawkshaw Rig but later turned right into a glen between that and Wardlaw, then crossed a fast-flowing burn and descended into woods behind Craig Douglas house, hoping to enter the grounds unseen. He failed. The backdoor in the deer fence banged open as he neared and four boys ran out, jostling for priority in helping him dismount and stable Sophia.

“If Jean clyped on me she’s a sleekit wee bitch,” he told them. They said nothing. Leaving the stable for the garden he saw all the Craig Douglas children and adolescents standing to left and right of the path, staring. Even babies in the arms of older sisters were gazing at him in silent wonder. He paused and said, “When I last came here you were a lot noisier.” Nobody spoke.

“Have you no tale for me Annie?” he asked a tall girl with a humorous cast of features. She said faintly, “We’re glad you’ve no come back like our uncles, Wat.”

He shrugged, went on to the house and found a mother waiting on the veranda. A week before she had been pleasantly plump; now there were dark hollows under her cheekbones and red-rimmed eyes. He said gruffly, “You look twenty years older, Mirren.”

She said coldly, “You’re the same as ever. Have you come to see your pals?”

He thought for a moment. The outer walls of the house and most of the inner ones were transparent just now. Only the dark-walled infirmary and the room of the woman he wanted to see allowed no glimpse of their interior. He sighed and nodded.

And followed the mother inside and across floors where only young women looked straight at him. Grannies, matrons and even a girl suckling an infant ignored him or looked away: this disturbed him far more than the silence of the youngsters outside. He was brought into the infirmary where five big translucent boxes lay, each containing what seemed pink fog with a complicated shadow inside. The mother pressed a stud. The infirmary darkened but the shadows became the well-lit bodies of young, naked, badly dismembered men, each with limbs and organs floating beside their torso and linked to it by threads like cobwebs. Only one body exhibited movement: eyes which slowly blinked in time with a mouth opening and shutting like the mouth of a fish. The face had no intelligence in it. Wat abruptly turned his back on these things. The ceiling went clear and admitted sunlight again.

“You can mend them?” he asked in a voice shrill with unbelief.

“Mibby. Perhaps. It will take years but they’re just lads.”

“Mirren, most of Charlie’s head is gone.”

“He’ll grow a new one if we can restore the heart. The new brain will have his character if not his memories.”

“Our memories are our character, Mirren.”

“Then the mother and sisters who love him will restore his memories, Wat Dryhope. We’ll give him back all the good things the war sliced away, but you won’t be one of them, Wattie! When he starts thinking again we’ll only remind him of what’s harmless!”

“You’re so maddened by grief that you’re blethering, Mirren. I know it’s a cruel injustice that I’m almost unhurt and your lads are nearly dead, but I’m the man who argued for what would have saved them. They refused it. And have you forgot that bloody Daddy Jardine was born and bred in this house by Craig Douglas women? Our general’s obstrapulous conceit wasnae nourished by the aunties of Dryhope.” “No woman on earth nourished Jardine’s conceit!” cried Mirren, “He got it in the Warrior house. We never scorned him for his wee-ness but other soldiers did until he showed he was spunkier than them and could take knocks without squealing. So they made him their pet, then elected him boss, and after that Craig Douglas never saw him again — except through the public eye — until two days back when the Red Cross gave us his remains with sixteen other corpses and the pieces you’re feart to turn round and see. Women had no part in making a bloody hero of Jardine Craig Douglas. Yes, he fathered weans in half the houses along Yarrow but he only wanted women for one thing. Like all soldiers the only folk he really loved were men!”

Wat heard this with bowed head then said, “All true, Aunt Mirren, but women arenae wholly innocent of the war game. You don’t take to fighting like we do — the world holds hardly a dozen tribes of professional Amazons — but many girls, aye, and many women are daft about soldiers. I’m a graceless brute so when I came home from the stars few women outside Dryhope house would look at me — not until I fought for Ettrick and showed some talent.”

“I cannae be fair to you, Wat,” the mother said drying her eyes, “Go to Nan.”

He walked swiftly to the other opaque-walled room, looking ceilingward to avoid eye-contact with anyone before reaching it. A teenage girl scampered out as he was about to enter, followed by another. He went in and shut the door by pulling across a heavy tapestry curtain. Then he faced the woman inside and said, “See me Nan! I’m a rare animal now, an Ettrick warrior with nothing obvious missing. But I cannae move my fingers and I feel nine tenths dead and as sexless as a neep. Do you still like Wat Dryhope?”

She smiled and beckoned.

Next morning she wakened Wat by prising his arms from around her and saying, “You neednae hold so tight, I won’t run away.”

She slipped out of bed and pulled on a long loose shirt. He raised himself by an elbow to watch. Playing a keyboard invisible to him she made a clear round window in the wall before her and raised it until it framed a hawk perched on the top branch of a Scotch pine and the summit of Whitelaw against a pale sky. By light from this Nan opened elegant boxes holding the materials of a meal and made breakfast.

She was nearly forty with short dark hair and a lively, clever face which appreciated everything she saw. While poaching an egg her frown of concentration left a small smile at the corners of the mouth, a humorous look which had been inherited by her daughters. Nearby was a loom where she wove rugs, door curtains, pillows with patterns that made this room different from any other, also the screen she used to design new patterns or play music. She had a talent for every worthwhile art, handling utensils with swift ease which soothed Wat’s mind as much as her fingers had soothed the rest of him the night before. He said, “I want to stay with you, here, in this room, till all the seas run dry, my dear, and the rocks melt in the sun. Can I do it for a week or two?”

“War fatigue?” she said, looking hard at him.

“No. I’m afraid of news from Geneva.”

“Are you feart they’ll disqualify the draw with Northumbria?”

“No. I hope they disqualify that draw. It will discourage suicidal heroics that have become the bane of honest warfare, especially in Scotland.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

“Did ye see our last battle?”

“Certainly not. No decent woman who’s borne a son watches battles.”

Slowly, almost unwillingly, Wat told her that someone he knew had struck a blow which had the appearance of being foul and might be condemned as such.

“Who was that?” said Nan, looking at Wat more closely still.

“If Geneva condemns him you’ll soon know,” said Wat drearily, “If it doesnae I’ll try to forget about it. Let me stay here for a fortnight Nan.” She said firmly, “Not possible. An hour from now I become mother and I cannae mother a whole household with you waiting round to be served. Sit up.”

She placed a closed mug of coffee where his mouth could reach a tube sticking from the top, then she sat on the bedside with a plate on her lap and fed him slices of poached-egg-on-toast. She said, “Go to Annie’s room — she’s mad about you and has no responsibilities. Stay there as long as you like. It will teach her something. Craig Douglas needs more bairns now and I don’t want to carry another.”

He groaned and said, “I think of Annie as a wee sister.”

“Aye, because you never look at her. Do it. Dick Megget was her dad. The Meggets havenae fucked with Dryhopes for three generations, there’s no fear of incest.”

He said wistfully, “With you, in this room, I feel better, more sure of myself than anywhere else in the world.”

“I doubt it. Annie says you looked bloody sure of yourself in that last battle. She plays it six times a day. She says you’re magnificent. Why are you no magnificent with me?” He scowled. She said, “Cheer up! You were my favourite soldier long before the rest got chopped. I liked you most because you didnae act the big hero. Yet in battle you’re better than others. Why?”

“Easy told,” said Wat drearily, “I’m usually clumsier than other men because I don’t like life as much, so danger speeds this body without upsetting this brain. Most soldiers only enjoy battles when looking back on them — while fighting they’re too excited to think so do it automatically. I think cooler and hit faster while fighting so I enjoy it at the time. Afterward the memory depresses me. I wish I had another talent.”

“I remember you six years ago as a queer lanky clever lad who wanted to seed the stars and got accepted for it. Were you useless there?”

“No, I could do the work but I hated the narrow places in the satellites, hated that every gramme of air we breathed or green thing we looked on had been contrived by human skill. I didnae hate it all, of course. A good thing about satellites is their lack of nourishment for our kind of powerplant, so men and women earn their living room by working together as equals. The men have no time for warfare. They sometimes fight duels, but hardly ever to the death. Many couples live as husband and wife and think of earthmen as lazy lecherous belligerent primitives. I agreed with them but I couldnae stand the enclosed spaces they lived in. Anyway, for me the satellites were just stepping-stones to the universe where immortals are making new worlds — and I hated that universe most of all. I could hardly face the deserts of dead rock and frozen stoor between the domed craters. The stars are fearsome out there, white, steady, and intense. Look at any two of them and if, like me, you’re cursed with good sight, you soon see a hundred between. Look hard at any two of those and the same thing happens no matter how close they seem. I lost all sense of darkness between them. It was not the vast darkness but the endless lights, the millions of starlights that made me feel less than a grain of stoor myself — I felt like zero. I trudged across one of these deserts with Groombridge who was testing my fitness for immortality. He said immortality would madden me unless I had a good reason for it and the only good reason was in the grains of dirt under our boots, the millions of stars over our helmets. He said the silence of these spaces did not appal minds in the network conspiring to bring them to life, but generations of mortals would die and be forgotten before Mars, Venus and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn had the ground and air to support freely evolving plants and intelligences. This was why people who chose immortality must prepare to live almost completely in the future. The main difference between neo-sapience and proto-sapience (that is what immortals call themselves and us) is, that the longer neo-sapiences live the more they know of their future, the longer we live the more we know of our past. Groombridge said mortals cling harder to the past as they age, so our lives have a tragic sweetness neo-sapience lacks, a painful sweetness got from memories of lost childhood, lost love, lost friends, lost opportunities, lost beauty et cetera — lost life, in other words. He said, ‘Our rejuvenation treatment still retains an embarrassing wealth of early memories but in two or three centuries we’ll overcome that. If you become immortal, Mr. Dryhope, by your five thousandth year the first fifty will have been erased by more recent, more urgent, more useful experiences, most of them gained through a virtual keyboard and scanner or their future equivalent. By your five thousandth year it is possible — and by your five millionth inevitable — that you will work in another galaxy in a body whose form we cannot now predict. By then, of course, the planet of your origin, like a myriad other worlds you’ve helped reshape, will have ceased to be even a cipher in your calculations. Perhaps I repel you, Mr. Dryhope?’ Yes, he scunnered me like a creature I once saw in an aquarium. It was harmless but I couldnae watch it because it breathed, ate and ejaculated through holes which, to my mind, were in the wrong places. From feeling zero he had made me feel minus, an absence with an ache inside. I had to return to things as bonny and temporary as you and those.”

He pointed to the green hilltop and the bird on the branch, then began biting his nails. She stopped that by putting down the plate and kissing him.

Later she washed, dried and dressed him in clean garments saying, “Don’t play the helpless wean too much with Annie, she’s had none of her own. Your hands will soon heal if you work the fingers.”

He said, “Nan, is there a kind, experienced body in Craig Douglas who would visit my brother Joe who’s short of an arm and leg? Three of his other limbs are in working order — four if you count the tongue.”

Nan said she would consider this.

“And Nan,” he muttered, looking away from her, “There is no kinder or more experienced body in Craig Douglas than you, but please get someone else to go.”

She stared, laughed then said, “Mibby you would have been happier in the bad old historical days when it was a man’s duty to be jealous, but I doubt it.”

Survivors of great slaughters knew they must help the women of their clan replace lost comrades so duty, not desire brought Wat to Annie’s room. Apart from a homo-erotic affair in the Warrior house all Wat’s lovers until now had been older than him so the childish furnishing in Annie’s room almost made him walk away. Shelves were crowded with cuddly toys, romantic videos about historical lovers and comic ones about talking animals. A typical young girl’s collage covered the walls; it showed Annie in many moods and dresses from babyhood to teens mingled with pictures of her mother, aunts, grannies, pets, girl friends, boyfriends and popular icons. Wat recognized Donald Duck, Botticelli’s Venus, Robert Burns, Alice in Wonderland, Krishna among the Cowgirls, King Kong, Rodin’s Kiss, Dracula, Marilyn Monroe and modern stills of famous soldiers from their most violent battles. Over her bed was a life-size cut-out of himself on the edge of the cliff shouting “No!” when asked if Ettrick would surrender. His heart lurched — was Scottish Wat now a legend like the African Inongo, American Winesburg, Chinese Pingwu? — then he felt sick. After that shout he had stabbed a man who thought the battle over. It was a filthy way to enter the erotic fancies of a sixteen-year-old girl. However, he let her undress him and entered her bed.

Before nightfall he was amazed to find he liked Annie better than her mother. Though less experienced in love and coffee-making she had Nan’s sensuality, humour and intelligence in a more slender and playful body. She made him feel powerful and wise. She also liked to sleep with her ceiling clear as glass. He opened his eyes early next morning and looked straight up at a full moon between banks of hurrying cloud. Not quite awake he felt Annie snuggle warm at his side, her arm across his chest. He thought he was lying with her on the floor of a roofless cottage in a wilderness far to the north. He seemed to remember escaping from a shameful disaster which had befallen but at least Annie and he were safe. Glad of this he fell asleep again.

Later she wakened him by singing, “A hero, a hero, a hero in my bed, the first man to fuck me is a heeeeero.”

Wat said, “You’ve fucked with others.”

“Only with laddies. Lads don’t count. Stop interrupting and listen!

A hero, a hero, a hero in my bed,

the first man to fuck me is a heeeeero.

I stole him from my mammy,

he wanted me instead,

O the first man to fuck me is a heeeeero.”

“Your mammy sent me here.”

“Aye but it’s good to pretend. Try it. You’ve fought three wars, right?”

“Aye.”

“And seven battles, right?”

“Aye. Your bloody uncle Jardine made the last war continue for three.”

“Seven bloody battles and never once wounded!” shouted Annie, “A miracle!” Wat showed her his hands. She shouted, “Seven bloody battles and never once wounded by the sworrrrrd! UNSCATHED HERO JAGGED BY JEALOUS WHINBUSH AFTER GLORIOUS LAST-MINUTE MIRACLEDRAW AGAINST OVERWHELMING ODDS! That’s how the public eye should have announced it. If I was wee Wattie Dryhope,” she said, kissing him sweetly, “I would pretend somebody was saving me for something gloriouser.”

“Which somebody? Jesus MacGod or Accident MacDestiny?”

“MacGod of course. God orders you to conquer the universe for him but you say, ‘No, sorry God, no till I’ve fathered a hundred lads on Annie Craig Douglas.’ But I say, ‘Go! I wilt never embrace thee nae mair until thou hast done God’s will.’ So you go conquering the universe till you’re an old bald done dry withered wee man, and return to find me as sweet and sappy, young and perjink as ever. ‘Nooky time!’ you wheeze, ‘Get them off.’ ‘Avaunt, Snotface!’ I graciously retort, ‘Or Wat or Julius Caesar or whatever you cry yourself. I cannae be thine, I am being shagged continuous by a greater than thou.’

‘Who?’ croaks you. ‘God,’ says me, ‘He sent you conquering to get ye out of my short hairs ha ha ha.’ … Is something bothering you Wattie?”

“Aye — your joke about me being kept for something great. I once used to believe that, Annie, but what great thing could it be? Modern wars arenae great affairs. The only greatness nowadays is in the folk building new satellites and immortals creating new forms of life.”

She kissed his ear and whispered, “I’ll tell you a great thing you can do. This is my best time of the month, you’ve been deep inside me, I’m sure I’ve got my first bairn — what better new thing can there be than that? And if it’s a lad promise you’ll like him Wattie. And if he joins the Ettrick warriors promise to be kind to him. I’ve heard awful tales about how young laddies get treated by older ones in the Warrior house.” “Don’t believe all ye hear,” said Wat, embracing her, “The old soldiers keep an eye on things. I’ll protect him if I’m still about.”

They were silent for a while. This was the third day of their honeymoon. Wat feared Annie would soon be bored and want to go and gossip about him with her mother and sisters and cousins. Wat was not bored. His queer dream had given him an idea though he had been shy of mentioning it till now. He said suddenly, “Do you want your son to become a soldier, Annie, and probably die before he’s thirty? Or do you want him to go to the stars and live till he forgets you existed? Or would you rather he joined the public eye and became a glib commentator on other men’s courage? Or left the clean homes of Ettrick and lived dirty with the gangrels?”

“It isnae a mother’s business to want things for her weans — it’s the weans’ business,” said Annie, puzzled, “Mothers who try to manage their weans’ lives always hurt them. Aunt Mirren tried to stop her sons becoming soldiers after Highlanders killed her first three at Stirling Moss. She tried to make them starmen by cramming them with physics and biology, so they ran to the Warrior house as soon as they could and came home hacked to pieces five days ago. No wonder she’s bitter. What are ye trying to tell me Wat Dryhope?”

“I’m trying to tell ye about a new way of living which hasnae been tried for centuries, Annie. I want us to pretend there’s nobody alive but you and me …” (Annie sat up looking interested) “… I want us to load a couple of ponies with a tent, food, seeds, a cross-bow, an axe and handy tools. I want us to ride far far to the north where the homes are few and the commons so mountainy that even gangrels seldom pass through. We’ll find a broken old stone house, mibby a hunting-lodge built when there were no commons and the whole land was owned by a few plutocrats. We’ll repair enough rooms to make a wee house of it. I’ll get food by hunting and gardening, you’ll cook it and make and mend our clothes.”

“Go camping and play husband and wife?” cried Annie, smiling, “I played that game with my first laddie when I was twelve but only for a night. The alfresco shitting scunnered him in spite of the nooky — he called wiping his bum with dockens alfresco shitting. It’ll be more fun with you.”

“It wouldnae be just fun if you played it with me, Annie, it would be a way of life. I’d contrive a hygienic latrine and hot-water system. We wouldnae come back.”

“But surely we would feel lonely after a few weeks!”

“Aye, very. We would hate it at first. Then the hard work of making an old-fashioned house together would teach us to depend on each other and love each other more than other men and women love each nowadays. Then the weans would come.”

“Who would deliver them?”

“Me. I’m no stranger to blood and screams, Annie, I’ll make sure nothing goes wrong.”

“That’s very cheery news, Wattie, but they’ll be sad wee weans with only me to love — no aunties and grannies — no cousins to play with — no neighbours!”

“They’ll have me as well as you.”

“Bairns don’t love dads.”

“They would have to love me because they’d have nobody else — apart from you. I’d be always sleeping in the same house, bringing in the food you cook for us, teaching them how to hunt and plant and chop firewood and clean the latrine.”

“But no neighbours, Wattie! The husbands and wives of historic times were so desperate for neighbours that they crowded into big huge ugly cities.”

“Right!” said Wat, growing heated, “And the cities bred poverty, plagues and greedy governments! So a few brave men and women — pioneers they were called — left the cities for the wild in couples and made clean new lives there like we can make.”

“Where and when did they do that?”

“In America three or four centuries ago.”

“I’m sure they’re no in America now. How long did they last?”

“I … I don’t exactly know.”

“Well, Wattie,” said Annie in a friendly voice,

“I’m sorry we’ve no plagues, poverty or governments to escape from, but I’ll be your pioneer wife as long as you can bear it.”

She shut her mouth tight to stop the smile at the corners becoming a grin. Wat saw it; she saw him see it, grinned openly and said, “But will wee me be able to content you when you’ve had big Rose of Cappercleuch and those Bowerhope twins and Lizzie of Altrieve and my mammy? Will you never want to see my mammy again? And have you forgot you’ll grow old and die in that wilderness, Wattie? I thought men fought battles and became heroes because they were afraid to grow old.”

He suddenly saw he had been a fool and the knowledge changed him. His face and neck reddened. With a sudden fixed smile, in a singsong voice unlike his usual gruff one, he asked if she knew why he hated women. Annie, aghast, stared and trembled. He said, “I hate women for their damnable smug security and for always being older than me, always older and wiser! Even a kid like you, Annie Craig Douglas, has stripped me of my self-respect by knowing more about me than I know about myself. And when I’m dead you’ll have lovers and babies and lovers and babies till you’re a great-great-granny telling stories to wee girls. And I’ll be one of your stories, the first warrior who fucked you — a daftie who wanted to run away and live alone with ye forever!”

Tears streamed from her eyes at this. She tried to embrace him. He pushed her away saying, “Keep your pity! I want the bad old days when wars had no rules and bombs fell on houses and men and women died together like REAL equals! Equal in agony and mutilation!”

“You’re sick, Wattie. Your head’s sick,” said Annie, weeping, “You’re worse than mad Jardine, your daddy.”

His rage stopped at once.

“True!” he said, ruefully touching his brow, “And it’s the only head I have. I’m sorry I lost my temper.”

“As mad as his father,” she muttered, pressing her hand to her womb, “O I’ll have to ask about this.”

She jumped out of bed and pulled on her dress. “Come back, Annie! Let’s have another wee cuddle. I’m all right again. I said I was sorry.”

“I don’t want a mad baby, Wat.”

“There is no such thing as a mad baby.” She slipped on her shoes without looking at him. Wat said, “Done with me, have you?”

“I’m too young to say, Wat. Bowerhope men never come here now because twice Craig Douglas women got weans with diseased blood by Bowerhope — and the disease was curable. I don’t know if daftness is, and my mammy is your dad’s second cousin. The grannies will know what’s right. But O Wat,” she wailed, tears flowing down her cheeks again, “I liked you fine before this! I wanted a bairn by you!” He said, “Aye,” and got up and started dressing. She lingered by the door, drying her tears and watching.

“I’ll be in the Warrior house if your grannies want to test my sanity,” he said abruptly, “They might want that before deciding you shouldnae carry our bairn. But I’ll no come back to Craig Douglas unless invited — tell everyone that. Tell Nan. Say goodbye to her for me. I never much liked the Warrior house but now it seems the one place where I’ll be welcome — though mibby no for much longer.”

LIKE ALL WHO LOVED VISITORS Annie had a room with a door onto the veranda of her home, so Wat left Craig Douglas that morning almost unnoticed at first. Near the stables he heard musical jangling and shrill shouts of, “Fall down you’re dead!” — ” No I clonked you first!”

In a sandpit by the path a jumble of colourful shelled creatures were hitting each other with tiny swords: infants in helmets and armour which pinged, twanged or clonked under different strengths of blow. They stood still as he drew level then the smallest ran to him and stuttered breathlessly, “When I grow up I’ll be a Amazon and kill men like you do cousin Wattie!”

She was a very wee girl. Wat paused and said politely, “Name and age?”

“Betty. Four.”

“Soldiers don’t fight to kill each other, Betty. We fight to win the respect due to courage.”

“Aye but killing men is still fun intit cousin Wattie?”

He shook his head hopelessly and entered the stable.

Three twelve-year-old lads knelt on the floor playing jorries. They sprang up, led the dapple grey from her stall, saddled and bridled her.

“Are you for the Warrior house Wat?” said one,

“Can we come with ye?”

“I’m for a quiet ride on my lonesome lone, men,” Wat told them sombrely, “I’m sorry your brothers got killed.”

“But they helped us draw with Northumbria,” said one gently as if offering consolation.

“Don’t fool yourselves, men. Geneva will declare our draw a foul. I know because I was chief fouler. Open that door.”

On the common he found his hands had healed enough to let him mount Sophia with dignity and after waving goodbye rode down to Yarrow. He suspected many eyes now watched him from the big house with the wood behind so did not look back. Wanting solitude he headed downstream toward Mountbenger along a mossy track between tangled hedges which followed the line of an old motorway.

The air felt close and heavy this morning though little gusts of wind sometimes refreshed it. A dull sky looked full of rain which never fell. Yellow gorse on the hillside was the only vivid colour. A mile above Mountbenger he soaked his legs fording the river and rode up the glen behind White Law, avoiding the houses of Altrieve and Hartleap by keeping to the hillside, and ascending Altrieve burn to the saddle between Peat Law and the Wiss. Though still brooding on the affection and respect he might lose by his quarrel with Annie he was soothed for a while by lonely distances which grew more visible the higher he came. Houses, cultivation, everything human was hidden in dips between a wilderness of grey heights. Vapour from powerplants was buried in ragged cloud which dimmed the highest summits. Nothing he now saw had changed since these hills divided Scotland from England in the historical epoch, the killing time when huge governments had split the world into nations warring for each other’s property. He recalled with pride that for centuries the border clans had held aloof from England and Scotland, siding with whichever nation was too weak to tax them. But theft and murder had flourished in these rough hills too. The old ballads were full of it. The only wealth here had been small black cattle and when illness or famine thinned the herds the wife of a homestead set a plate with a pair of spurs on it before her man when he sat down to eat, a hint that he must now raid the English farms or starve. Yes, it was luxury to fear the ill opinion of the Ettrick aunts more than an empty belly, to worry about an unfair blow struck in a war between willing fighters, to suffer because he had frightened a healthy young girl in a moment of rage. He smiled and heard wind stir the grasses, near and distant cries of the whaups, and once what sounded like voices behind a clump of whins. Crossing a shoulder of hillside with a view into the gardens of Hartleap he saw what seemed half the family down there looking up at him. Later he glimpsed tiny figures withdraw behind the cairn on the summit of Bowerhope Law.

Signs of being watched and followed increased until he emerged from the woods above Thirlstane burn where the watchers and followers stopped trying to keep out of sight. He went down the gully with children of every age between eight and fifteen scrambling and leaping and dodging along the slopes on each side. The smallest rode ponies, two or three to a back. A surprising number were girls and the whole crowd was too big to be local — several must have come over from Eskdale or farther. Obviously something he did not know had made him interesting yet untouchable; only a huge, communal, fascinated shyness explained the movements of this company which covered the slopes beside him yet stayed out of talking range. His killing of the Northumbrian who held the standard had likely been condemned as a war crime so that Ettrick was now a shamed and beaten clan. Did these children hate or sympathize with him? They probably did not know themselves; they were waiting to learn how he would be received at the Warrior house. Wat feared nobody in the Warrior house, he dreaded nothing but the ill opinion of the women. Determined to learn the worst he sat upright and rode forward with a bold front unlike his usual brooding slouch.

A line of water as pale as the sky appeared above trees below; it was the head of Saint Mary’s Loch and the Warrior house flag wagged against it. With various shouts the children raced downhill away from him and in less than five minutes he was alone again. If Sophia had not been a tired old pony he would have raced ahead of them; instead he paused, tempted by a track which ran sideways to Bowerhope where he was sure of a private welcome from a couple of sisters. Then a gleaming globe spun up from behind a blaeberry clump and hung before his face saying, “What is your reaction to the news from Geneva, Major Dryhope?”

He shut his eyes, clapped the pony’s flanks with his heels and was carried straight downhill. He heard another voice, soft and female, say, “By all means treat the public eye with contempt Major Dryhope, but you must have something to say against Geneva’s condemnation of your father and clan.”

With an effort he kept his face immobile and eyes shut for at least three minutes. When he opened them the globe had vanished.

The Warrior house was built over the short river flowing into Saint Mary’s Loch from Loch of the Lowes. Four steep glass-fronted gables, a central pyramidal skylight, a hexagonal tower faceted with mirrors made it look like a futuristic village in a 1930s Hollywood movie or a postmodern art gallery designed sixty years later. This archaic appearance was enhanced by an absence of powerplant. Wat saw that the plain before the eastern gable was covered by a standing horde of children too young to be cadets, and adolescents of both sexes, and older men on horseback from houses normally indifferent to warrior business. A greybeard and three younger men from the musical house of Henderland were conspicuous by the instruments they held. The horsemen and pony riders stood right and left of the path to the entrance. As Sophia ambled down it Wat had a dream-like sense of having done this before, then remembered his walk from the stable through the children of Craig Douglas. Passing a group of boys with Annie in it he noticed many of the Craig Douglas children were here too. She was staring open-mouthed with hand half raised as if wanting yet fearing to catch his attention. He nodded absent-mindedly to her for he was trying to understand the mood of this dense crowd gazing at him with no obvious sign of anger or pleasure. Then a shrill voice from behind (and it sounded like Annie’s) cried,

“Hooray for Wattie Dryhope!” and the whole crowd began roaring, howling, yelling that too. Through the roar he heard powerful drones followed by vivid squeals. The Henderlands were piping. Their tune swelled up and overwhelmed the welter of cheering and it was the tune of a song everyone had known since childhood. In less than a minute the crowd was singing —

“March, march, Ettrick and Teviotdale,

Why my lads dinna ye march

forward in order?

March, march, Eskdale and Liddesdale,

All the Blue Bonnets are over the Border!”

— so they liked him. Tears of relief streamed down his face though he kept it rigid. He also noticed, without pleasure, public eyes spinning over the heads of the crowd. Recovering most of the assurance he had lost since rolling off the cliff he began to notice something unpleasant in this unanimous bellowing of what had once seemed a nostalgic old marching song —

“Come from the hills

where your hirsels are grazing,

Come from the glen

of the buck and the roe;

Come to the crag where

the beacon is blazing,

Come with the buckler,

the lance and the bow!”

He reacted by scowling while Sophia, also disliking the noise, broke into a clumsy little gallop which brought him to the porch. Here Boys’ Brigade captains, one of them Wat’s twelve-year-old brother Sandy, swarmed round him grinning like lunatics and jabbering something in which standard was the only distinct word. He yelled, “Give Sophia a feed ye gowks — let Sandy get me a whisky,” and leapt down and rushed inside.

Within the door he was stopped by a group of veterans: men over forty whose thick beards and moustaches did not hide their scars. Each shook his hand in turn, looking him straight in the eye and giving a firm little nod which struck him as more farcical than the communal roaring outside. Behind the veterans every cadet in Ettrick between eleven and fourteen years seemed crowded into the eastern lobby, grinning or open-mouthed or trying to look as grim as he felt himself. On the stair to the officers’ mess the house servants stood like servants in the mansion of a Victorian duke assembled to welcome the young laird home. They were ranked behind the major domo, a stately giant with whiskers bushier than the fiercest veteran’s. He said, “Master Wattie, I hope at last I may persuade you to a dram?”

“Thanks Jenny. I have asked Sandy for one.”

“Master Sandy will receive it from my hands.” The major domo led Wat upstairs processionally with Sandy beside him and the veterans in the rear. Martial discipline ensured a decent silence among them but did not lessen the deafening bellow outside which still made sense to those who knew the words —

“England shall many a day

tell of the bloody fray,

When the Blue Bonnets

came over the Border!”

The officers’ mess was under the gable above the eastern lobby. Wat was appalled by its emptiness. A week ago over two hundred cheerful men most of them in their late teens and twenties, had been drinking, laughing and chatting there; the dozen veterans now converging on the bar emphasized the difference. So did three cripples in orthopaedic chairs playing a game of whist: Colonel Tam Wardlaw, Rab Gillkeeket and Davie Deuchar. Wat had not seen them since the charge downhill with the standard. He went over and stood looking down on the game but they gave no sign of recognition though the Colonel said to the others, “Here comes trouble. I pass.”

“Solo,” said Rab.

“Misère,” said Davie.

Wat covered his embarrassment by saying,

“Northumbria has made a bonny mess of you three.”

“We might have been as fit as you if we’d rolled off a cliff,” muttered Rab.

“True,” said Wat abruptly, “Public eyeballs are snooping outside. D’ye mind doing with less daylight, Colonel?”

Colonel Wardlaw shrugged a shoulder.

“Frost the window, Jenny!” Wat called to the major domo behind the bar. Between the double sheets of glass a paperthin water fall slid down then froze into starry white patterns which broke the appearance of the crowd and the hills outside into jagged shadows. Wat pulled a chair up to the table and sat watching the players until the Colonel said, “Do you want a hand?”

“I want news from Geneva.”

Tam Wardlaw handed him a printed sheet. Wat held it without reading until his young brother put a whisky in the other hand.

“Wattie Dryhope is at The Macallan,” sang Davie softly.

“Not possible!” said Rab, “Dryhope never touches alcohol. It upsets his chemistry.”

“He’s drinking it now,” said the Colonel, “His chemistry must be out of order.”

“Give us peace,” muttered Wat and read the printout.

The Global and Interplanetary Council for War Regulation Sitting in Geneva has considered General Dodds’s complaint against the recent draw between Ettrick and Northumbria United. General Dodds accuses Ettrick of obtaining the result by a foul pretence of surrender which did not take place, resulting in the murder of at least three Northumbrians who dropped their guard having been deceived into thinking the battle over. As proof of this he refers the Council to the public eye battle archive.

The Council has scrutinized the battle archive closely and believes there is good reason to condemn Ettrick but not for the action to which General Dodds objects. That a certain amount of deception is an inevitable and accepted part of combat is proved by that sword stroke known as a feint, nor is it unusual for hard-pressed troops to relinquish their standard to an enemy in order to counterattack more strongly. The Northumbrians holding the Ettrick standard believed the momentary pause signified surrender because they knew Ettrick could not win, being hopelessly outnumbered; but the Geneva Convention expressly states NO SOLDIER IS DEEMED TO HAVE SURRENDERED BEFORE HE DROPS HIS WEAPON OR OFFERS THE HILT, BUTT OR HANDLE TO THE OPPONENT. This did not happen. In the slaughter following the resumption of fighting after a twelve-second pause nearly every Ettrick warrior died sword in hand. If any dropped them or flung them away General Dodds’s troops did not notice.

But the Global and Interplanetary Council for War Regulation Sitting in Geneva is forced to condemn General Jardine Craig Douglas for a war crime worthy of the twentieth century. He was wrong to lead his clan into a third day of battle which must end in the death of nearly all his men, many of them cadets recently promoted from the Boys’ Brigade. His own death — however gladly embraced — is no compensation for theirs, however gladly they embraced it. The purpose of warfare is not scoring points over an opponent: it is to show human contempt of pain and annihilation. Most armies do this without exploiting the self-sacrificial urge of trainees who admire their senior officers. When such exploitation is proposed it is not treachery for officers to defy the general who proposes it. The Global and Interplanetary Council for War Regulation Sitting in Geneva regrets that Major Wat Dryhope was the only Ettrick warrior who appeared to recognize this fact …

Wat chuckled and said loudly, “I’ve just read the bit that explains why you chaps don’t like me now.”

“Aye,” said the Colonel, “You’re suffering the doom of everyone too good for their kindred.”

“Wat Dryhope, humanity’s darling,” sang Davie.

“Wattie! The standard!” whispered Sandy urgently, “Ask them when we can — ”

“Wheesht,” said Wat and continued reading.

For the past twenty years the Council has noticed a tendency for small, competitive clans to throw younger and younger cadets into the battle line. True lovers of fighting must deplore the harm this does to the noble art of war. By his holocaust of young lives General Jardine Craig Douglas has broken the splendid line of Ettrick victories which began with the century. At least a decade must pass before Ettrick breeds and trains enough adult soldiers to fight again at a professional level.

So the Global and Interplanetary Council for War Regulation Sitting in Geneva proposes three additions to the Geneva Convention.

1 — No war will extend to a third day of battle.

2 — No cadets of less than sixteen years shall be admitted to the battle line.

3 — When a standard leaves a field of battle by the interposition of a natural feature or phenomenon (cliff, crag, hill, cavern, canyon, pot-hole, volcanic vent or other geological formation; bog, swamp, shifting sands, stream, pond, river, lake, lagoon, sea, ocean or other body of water; breeze, wind, gale, tempest, sandstorm, hurricane, cyclone, tornado, lightning, fireball, aerolith or other meteorological event) the battle will be judged to have ended at that moment of the standard’s departure from the field of battle, and victory will belong to the side which has lost fewest men.

The Global and Interplanetary Council for War Regulation Sitting in Geneva hereby declares a moratorium upon all armed conflict until a global and interplanetary referendum decides by a simple majority that each of these rules is accepted or rejected as part of the Geneva Convention. Everyone over fifteen years of age will be eligible to vote.

Meanwhile the Global Council for War Regulation Sitting in Geneva declares that these humanitarian proposals in no way disparage the honesty and courage of the Ettrick soldiers who carried out General Jardine Craig Douglas’s plan, while still condemning absolutely their recklessness in obeying him. The Global and Interplanetary Council for War Regulation Sitting in Geneva agrees with the public eye and the mass of public opinion, in declaring the battle between Northumbria and Ettrick a draw; but also declare it a battle fought in circumstances degrading to the senior officers responsible, a kind of battle which must never be repeated.

Wat screwed the printout into a ball, cried, “Good for Geneva!” and flung the ball lightly at Colonel Wardlaw so that it bounced off his ear. The Colonel flinched then muttered, “Hard on your dad.”

“It’s right about the Dad! But we’ll forgive his bloody craziness if it gets three good rules like that made law.”

“You havenae drunk your whisky,” said Rab.

“I don’t need it now,” said Wat, standing and going to them. They too were drinking Macallan. He tipped a neat third of his glass into each of theirs then signed to the barman for a strong coffee. It was brought.

“I hate Dryhope, he’s a smug bastard,” sang Davie softly.

“He cannae help it,” said Rab, “He wins a world-famous draw by cheatery, fails in his suicide attempt and gets praised by Geneva for standing up to his daddy, though he did exactly what the old man telt him. Do you hate him too, Colonel?”

“Aye, but I hate his wee brother worse. Cadet Dryhope!” yelled the Colonel, “Stop standing there like a replica of Michel-fucking-angelo’s David! In the days before the establishment of our democratic Utopia pretty wee soldiers who stood straight and cocky in front of crippled officers were given a hundred lashes. Slouch like your brother.”

“But the standard!” whispered the boy trying to slouch and plead frantically at the same time. “Clear out Sandy,” said Wat. Sandy left. As he opened and shut the door they heard a burst of hubbub from below pierced by the music of pipes playing a coronach.

“Colonel Wardlaw!” said Wat sharply, “Tell me now why grown men like the Henderlands and Foulshiels — men with no interest in warrior business — are waiting downstairs among a crowd of weans and lassies.”

“I don’t know,” muttered Wardlaw.

“Will I go down and find out?” asked Wat.

“The game’s a bogie, men,” said the colonel to the other players. He flung his cards on the table and turned his chair to face Wat. Davie dealt the cards again and went on playing with Rab.

In a low voice pitched for Wat’s ears only Colonel Wardlaw said, “Look at my face, Dryhope.”

Wat did so with frank pleasure because it took his attention away from the surgical corset holding the Colonel’s body together; then he saw that only a pale-blue left eye showed intelligence. The bloodshot right stared fixedly sideways from a pupil so big it blotted out the iris.

“Sorry, Tam,” said Wat quietly, “I thought only your lower parts were hurt.”

“No. The head has the worst damage and not where you see it. There’s a sore buzzing inside that I try to think isnae an insect. I wish you’d spent a month wandering the hills, Wattie, because I need peace. I said Here comes trouble when you arrived because you make us a quorum — the three officers and one colonel needed to dispatch urgent regimental business. Wattie, neither me nor Rab nor Davie could dispatch a paper aeroplane. We’re as queer and gruesome as a week with nine Mondays. I’m done with soldiering, Wattie. We’re all done with soldiering. The knocks we got from Northumbria are mainly why but that message from Geneva finished us. A spate of others marked urgent followed it. They’re in this pouch — ” (Tam clapped a satchel under the armrest of his chair) “ — I darena look at them.”

“Gie’s them,” said Wat, stretching out a hand,

“Jenny could have answered them but I’ll do it faster. I bet half can be ignored and the rest answered with Thanks for your friendly letter. And forget Geneva, Tam. It said the truth, but no honest soldier or kind woman will scorn us for obeying our elected commander.”

Wat put the wad of sheets on a nearby table and quickly sorted it into two piles, one of blue sheets from public eye companies, one of pink sheets meaning warrior business. Tam watched with an expression in which weariness, indifference and anxiety oddly blended. Two minutes later Wat lifted the blue pile and said, “These are from every big eye company there is, the nearest in the Lothians, the farthest in the satellite belt. We know they want to exploit public excitement about a battle which for us is past and done, so we answer them this way.” With a sharp wrench Wat tore that pile in two, laid the bits on a chair then sorted through the other, this time glancing at a line or two before laying each one aside. Once he paused and said, “Colonel Tam, why were our wee lads yattering about standards?”

“They want permission to fish our old pole out of the North Sea. They’re feart some of Dodds’s tykes will get it first and melt it intae the roots of a Northumbrian powerplant.”

Tam sipped his whisky. Wat finished reading then turned and said, “Cellini’s Cosmopolitan Cloud Circus remind you that tomorrow night they will pay homage to mankind’s most famous draw with a completely new spectacle called From the Big Bang to the Battle of the Ettrick Standard: a Creative Evolutionary Opera to be performed on the hills round Selkirk. The rest are congratulations from clan chiefs everywhere, some of them world champions. Many blame Geneva for what some call a nursemaid attitude to the noble art of war. And here’s one to cheer you — Shafto of Northumbria wishes us well and says he didn’t subscribe to Dodds’s protest against the draw. This other is the only one needing a careful answer. Border United — the chiefs of Eskdale, Teviotdale, Liddesdale and the Merse — regret our loss of folk fit to train the next generation of Ettrick fighters. They will lend us officers of their own, on a rotation basis, not to fight battles of course but to get our youngsters ready for them. What do you say to that?”

“Answer it yourself. Answer it how you like,” said Tam, “I telt the truth when I said I’m done with every game but cards.”

His haunted expression did not change but something like a smile twisted it. In a hollow, resounding voice which all in the mess turned to hear he announced: “As Colonel of the Ettrick Army met in a quorum of my fellow officers in the absence of our dearly deceased General Jardine Craig Douglas, I appoint YOU, Major Dryhope, my successor with full plenary powers to do what the hell you like until such time as you get yourself — or someone else — elected general in Jardine’s stead. Arise Colonel Dryhope, greatest of Ettrick’s sons! I also declare that I and Rab Gillkeeket and Davie Deuchar are henceforth a trio of clapped-out veterans fit for nothing but games our grannies taught us. Deal me a hand, lads.” He turned his chair back to the card table where Davie Deuchar, after slowly clapping his hands together twice, shuffled and dealt.

Wat had risen to his feet when the Colonel told him to. He now stood wondering why his new appointment did not surprise him, though he had certainly never expected it. The obvious answer was that only he was fit for it. He wished Colonel Wardlaw had passed on the job in kinder language. The veterans at the bar saluted him then raised and drained their glasses. He saluted back and was wondering what to do next when the major domo approached, bowed, murmured that the crowd downstairs had been long awaiting an announcement, and asked if Colonel Dryhope wished the decision the quorum had just expressed through Colonel Wardlaw to be made public.

“Verbatim?” said Wat, sharply.

“No sir: in a form suitably edited for the public ear,” said Jenny as reproachfully as if his intelligence had been questioned.

“Go ahead Jenny.”

Jenny left by a door behind the bar and Wat stood listening intently. He heard throbbings of a speaker then a swelling cheer which got louder until even here it was uncomfortably loud. It did not stop. Wat wondered why there was something soothing in the sound.

“Shut them up Dryhope!” yelled Tam, “Talk to them! The glaikit sumphs want their new sweetheart to simper audibly.”

Jenny approached again, bowed, put his moustache ticklingly close to Wat’s right ear and said, “Does Colonel Dryhope wish to respond to the ovation by loudspeaker, or will he prefer to personally address the Boys’ Brigade in the hall of the standards? In either case his words will be relayed to the crowd outside.”

Wat felt the moustache withdraw and saw Jenny’s large flat ear presented to his mouth. He said thoughtfully, “Tell them that in fifteen minutes I’ll speak from the roof of the eastern porch — that will give the Boy’s Brigade time to go outside. But first tell their captains to come here to the mess. And … and I must make a private call to Northumbria first. The speech will start in thirty minutes, not fifteen.” He went out with Jenny and the cheering stopped soon after.

Later he returned, spoke briefly with veterans at the bar, went to the door, admitted six Boys’ Brigade captains and talked to them while Jenny served them half pints of shandy. This was their first time in the officers’ mess and they behaved with fitting dignity. Then Wat approached Tam, Rab and Davie and said quietly, “One last request, lads.”

“Request refused,” said Wardlaw, “What is it?”

“I’m making a speech from the porch roof and want you with me.”

“Ye want us for a balcony appearance, Colonel Dryhope?” sang Davie loudly, “Like the clique who stood about behind Hitler above the Potsdamstrasse? Or made Stalin look less lonely outside the Kremlin? An hour ago you frosted that window to shut out public eyeballs. I knew power corrupts but didnae know it corrupted that fast!”

“You don’t need our support, Dryhope,” said Tam Wardlaw sourly.

“O I do, I need all three of you,” said Wat, kneeling so that his face was level with theirs, “Our families want to be proud of Ettrick, no matter what Geneva says. That’s why folk of every sort except aunts and grannies are waiting outside. We can make them proud if we stand together. I’ll be out there with old Megget and Cappercleuch and Hartleap, veterans who fought at Ilkley and Kettering and Sunningdale. I’ll have captains of the Boys’ Brigade beside me, champions of the future. How can I inspire pride when the best soldiers to survive our hardest fight — three of the quorum who made me Colonel — sit girning in the shadows like sulky bairns while the rest of us stand in the sunlight trying to look brave? Ye dour lazy bitches, ye don’t even need to stand! You’ve nae legs! All ye need do is roll your chairs through the door ahint ye.”

“Does he persuade, Deuchar?” wondered Rab Gillkeeket, “If my glands were not disjaskit his rhetoric would get the adrenalin flowing, but does he persuade?”

“He appealed to our clan patriotism,” pondered Davie, “Then flattered, shamed and mocked. This blend of the pawkie, couthie and earthy was once thought characteristic of the Scottish peasantry but Wat isnae a peasant and we’re naething but wrecks. What says Wardlaw?”

Tam Wardlaw said violently, “We’ll do it and be done with it.”

Wat nodded, told them to be ready in five minutes then went to a table where Jenny had laid a tumbler of milk and plate of sandwiches, his first meal that day.

The starry film of frost vaporized and drifted up leaving the wall transparent. A section of it opened onto a roof garden over the porch. Wat sent the veterans and boys’ captains out with drinks in their hands to sit where they liked, then he and the cripples followed, wending through the tables to the rail that served as parapet. He put a chair between Wardlaw and Deuchar and sat with arms folded on the rail, waiting.

This informal arrival drew little attention. The cloud had broken letting afternoon sunlight through. The crowd, much bigger than when he arrived, was now in a holiday mood. Picnic parties sat chatting on the turf; groups surrounded fiddlers, wrestlers, singers, debaters. The kind of alcohol and snuff no housemother would synthesize was being traded by gangrels in return for wristcoms and items of clothing. Some people in bright outlandish garb were advertising the cloud circus. He noticed a woman on twenty-foot-tall stilts covered by red and white striped trousers. She wore a star-spangled top hat and tail coat, and stepped about over the heads of the crowd waving in a comically threatening way a parasol shaped like a nuclear bomb cloud. Children on the verge of the crowd raced ponies through bracken and heather. The only solemn touches were groups of horsemen who had been waiting since morning, some mounted, some standing at their animals’ heads. One thing that worried him was a public eye a yard from his face. No open-air meeting as big as this had met in peacetime for a century so public eyes would intercut his speech with film of leaders haranguing huge crowds in the late historical era. Since he and his comrades were not standing in formal groups he would look, as well as sound, very different. He glanced at the tiny microphone on his chest and decided to speak seated, with folded arms.

Suddenly he noticed part of the crowd he had overlooked. On the ground before the porch the Boys’ Brigade stood in six straight ranks. Feet apart, arms clasped behind them, faces tilted up toward Wat, the exact stance of each one made him a childish replica of the rest. Captainless, ordered outside by a servant to hear the new colonel’s speech, they had chosen this way to show the discipline that divided them from civilians. Wat stood up, smiling, and bent toward them. He muffled the microphone with one hand, saluted with the other and called down, “Break ranks, men, this — ”

He had been going to say is not a military occasion but a huge hollow woofing drowned his words: the microphone was more sensitive than he had known. He stood erect and saw everyone was now attending; the only sound was the fading drone of a bagpipe and the rustle of folk turning or standing to see him more clearly. He said quietly, “This is Wat Dryhope about to speak to friends. Will the public eye please shift from between us?”

The eye moved slightly aside. His voice had carried to the back of the crowd without manic-sounding reverberations but he sensed an immediate excitement, a hunger for the emotional unity that had greeted his descent from the hillside. This excitement gave him a feeling of righteous power because, unlike dark-age politicians, he was going to dissolve that mindless unity by the calm delivery of sensible information. He said, “I havenae much to say but most of you have been waiting here for hours so I’ll sit here and say it. If you’ve any sense you’ll follow my example — that’s a suggestion. The junior cadets will meanwhile break ranks and sit on the ground — that’s an order.”

He sat down with arms folded on the railing. The Boys’ Brigade did as he commanded. With a murmur suggesting amusement all but the horsemen followed their example. Wat gave his speech.

“I suppose you’ve come here to learn things you might not get from the public eye, which exists to make entertainment out of serious war games. Here are the straight facts. Colonel Tam Wardlaw here has given me his job because I’m the only soldier in Ettrick with two arms, two legs and no internal injuries. I am in this healthy state because General Craig Douglas ordered me to lead the vanguard, which was the safest job in our last battle. Our whole army was organized to get me safe to the cliff top where I did my wee trick with the standard. While getting me there our army was almost wholly destroyed but I’m all right. No wonder Geneva condemned that tactic.

“My present health is also due to me rolling off the cliff when the massacre started, and to a bush that caught me after I’d done that, and to General Shafto of Northumbria who pulled me off it. Less than an hour ago I spoke to General Shafto and told him we feared that North Sea currents might wash our old pole out of reach. He is sending divers from Whitby to locate it and attach a buoy. Tomorrow we can recover it when we like. Good men, the Northumbrians.

“What of the future? As Geneva says, ten years must pass before we can breed and train another professional army so there is no urgent need to elect a new general. Our wounded officers will recover, though we cannot say how completely. Some of our veterans may return to active service. In three or four years young captains beside me here will be old enough to fight. There are potential generals on this platform, and standing among you, and many more at home with their aunts. Building an army comes before choosing a general. Luckily our neighbours on the banks of Tweed and Leader, Teviot and Esk will lend officers to train youngsters and new recruits.”

He stood up and said, “That was my news. Goodbye.”

He saluted and was turning to leave when a voice said, “Can I say a word to you Colonel Dryhope?”

It was a firm voice, quiet, adult, male and it came from the crowd.

“You’ve said several already,” said Wat turning back, “Seven at least. How did you say them through the Warrior house speakers?”

“I’m Archie Crook Cot,” said the voice. This caused a burst of laughter; the Crook Cots were famous for their electronic expertise.

“That explains it,” said Wat, looking amiably toward a group of horsemen with one stout rider a little before the rest, “What have you to say, Archie?”

“Just that Geneva’s wrong about the ten years. More than two hundred full-grown Ettrick men are here to sign on as recruits today and you may get as many tomorrow. Our average age is eighteen or so. If we put our backs into the training … and we will lads, won’t we?” he asked turning in his saddle — there was a widespread shout of “Aye!” — “Then you’ll have a full adult fighting force in less than a year.” The last words were drowned in a storm of cheering as the whole crowd of younger folk jumped to their feet shouting and clapping and laughing. The Henderlands raised their pipes, puffed their cheeks and were obviously about to raise the sound level.

“YE GOWK ARCHIE!” yelled Wat, “YE DOITED GOMERIL! YE STUPIT NYAFF! YE BLIRT!”

The amplification was so great that the crowd was silenced, many clapped their hands to their ears, Tam Wardlaw turned his chair and sped back to the mess. With an effort Wat said more quietly, “Men become soldiers, Archie Crook Cot, because we’re no good at anything else! The Crook Cots are teachers, wizards, gurus in the mandarin network! When I was in the satellite belt people who heard my voice said, ‘You’re Scottish. Which part?’ ‘Ettrick,’ said I. ‘Ettrick?’ said they, ‘Do you know the Crook Cots?’ and because I had played with ye when we were bairns their respect for me doubled. Whenever crazy chemicals provoke a new virus — or maybe it’s the other way round, I’m too ignorant to ken — the star seeders want the problem keyed into a mandarin web with at least one Crook Cot guru in it. Why should anyone with an ounce of intellectual talent train for a life of grievous bodily harm?”

“You think we havenae the spunk for it Wat?” jeered a voice from somewhere and provoked scattered laughter.

“Wattie,” said Archie pleasantly, “There’s no use saying what our aunties told us this morning. You’re a great soldier and have no illusions about fighting. I’m a guru and don’t think much of my job either. I enjoy playing mandarin on keyboards, spinning threads in a web of knowledge that will join the stars one day, but I’m no immortal genius. Immortals talk to me like an equal because I know their language and they find me useful, but when my cousin Willie told me yesterday he was off to join the army I discovered I was an Ettrick patriot before anything else.”

“WHY?” said Wat sharply enough to quell the beginnings of another cheer.

“For fun,” said Archie and across the sea of heads Wat saw a toothy grin divide the round face of the squat figure on the horse, “I enjoyed spreading consternation through an eternal network which thought me a dependable unit. I like the amazement, admiration and grief my sisters, aunts and grannies now feel for me. But I most like astonishing myself. What! Will a guru like me drill for months in the martial arts and sleep in his cloak during forced marches over the hills? The notion is too fantastic to be resisted. Mibby I’ll crack under the strain. I doubt it. We’ll see.”

The cheer which now arose was too loud to be quelled. Wat strolled up and down the platform waiting for it to fade. He noticed that the veterans and Boys’ Brigade captains now stood behind him in the formal groups he had meant to avoid, but now they would have looked silly seated so he gave them an approving nod. The more he thought about this renewal of the army the more exciting it seemed. When he again faced the crowd a small tight smile twisted his mouth. He silenced the fading din with a gesture and said, “There is no law to stop any man in Ettrick joining us if he’s healthy and crazy enough to do it. If I tried to keep ye out now you’d think I wanted all the wee boys to myself. Go back to your homes and send your names and physical profiles here. If you’re fit you’ll get word saying what to bring for your first term of training which, I promise, will be no picnic. You’ve seven days to change your minds while I work out a completely new training programme. Goodbye.”

He turned his back on a new wave of cheering and went quickly into the mess where a fit of huge yawning seized him.

“You need a rest, Colonel Dryhope,” murmured Jenny.

“Rest and privacy, Jenny.”

“The commander’s quarters are ready for you sir,” said Jenny and led him from the mess into the communications room, led him from there by lift to an apartment he was visiting for the first time. The last man to use it had been his father.

WAT WAKENED sitting on a lavatory pan, sure he had not been unconscious for more than a minute or two. On leaving the cubicle he could not at first remember where he was and why. Through clear walls on every side he saw hills, woods, lochs he had known from childhood. They were lit by familiar evening sunlight but in an order he could not recognize. A central part was missing — the Warrior house. Then he realized he was above it. The Ettrick commander’s apartment was in a tower which from outside he had always thought a solar heating duct. Delighted by his new elevation he let out a bark of laughter which almost hurt his throat. Without hurry he bathed then dressed in a clean suit of loose clothes which fitted perfectly. He walked about glorying in the soft carpet, the spare efficient furniture, the combination of perfect comfort with a view commanding the countryside he loved best. No wonder his father had preferred this place to houses where all apartments were on the same level.

“Privacy and power,” he murmured aloud,

“Power and privacy.”

He would hate leaving here if someone else became general, but who else could they make general? Three days ago he had honestly meant to nominate Joe for the job but then a new army had seemed years away. If Archie Crook Cot was right Ettrick would perhaps be able to fight again in six months. Some recruits would certainly crack under their training — he hoped so, it would show the strength of the rest — but only Wat Dryhope would be fit for the general’s job if he did not waste time daydreaming. Sitting at a keyboard Colonel Dryhope summoned a series of training programmes and started adapting them to the probable needs of middle-aged recruits.

There was a slight cough and he saw Jenny laying a meal on a table.

“Yes, it’s time I ate,” said Wat, “And I appreciate your quality of silence. But next time warn me before you enter. A quiet tinkle will do. When a chain of thoughts is being connected even wee surprises can break it.”

“I will do so in future, Colonel Dryhope, but may I speak?”

“Fire away,” said Wat, sitting at the table and uncovering a dish of roast woodcocks.

“I have served four Ettrick commanders, Colonel Dryhope, and those who worked hardest kenned how to relax. Three relaxed with alcohol but you, I think, are your father’s son?”

“Aye?”

“Messages await your attention, Colonel Dryhope. Some will be invitations,” said Jenny, pointing to a shelf where a stack of papers lay under a wallprinter.

“Sort them for me,” said Wat pouring gravy on small brown bodies, “Put messages about warrior business on my desk. Put messages from public eye channels down the waste chute. Bring the rest here.”

For several minutes Wat sucked delicate meat from small bones and disposed of a salad. He was pouring coffee when Jenny laid a sheaf of pale violet papers beside the cup. Wat said,

“Good man, Jenny. Have my pony saddled and waiting in twenty minutes. I may go out.”

“Would not a horse be a more suitable mount, Colonel Dryhope? The late general’s favourite, Bucephalus, is both elegant and docile.”

“I’m no an elegant horseman,” said Wat pleasantly, “Go away and do what I said, Jenny.”

The prints contained intimate portraits and were mostly from women who adored him for qualities they had noticed through the public eye. A few were from older women he knew well; they pleased him best. He was hurt to find nothing from Nan but she hated warrior business and probably disliked him being a colonel. A note from her daughter Annie begged him to call at once. He did. In a voice full of happiness and tears she said, “O Wattie Wattie. O Wattie Wattie.”

“Hello there.”

“O Wattie I was daft to be feart when ye were mad at me this morning, my aunties and grannies have telt me I was daft, all soldiers have wee mad fits when they’ve been in bad wars, they say, and it doesnae hurt the bairns they get so I can see ye again, Wattie! Tonight if ye like!”

He took a moment to remember what she was raving about then said awkwardly, “That’s good, Annie, but tonight I want to see your mother, if she’ll have me. Do you think Nan will have me?”

He heard a wailing from Craig Douglas which made him glad he had not made a visual connection. He said hastily, “Yes Annie. Fine. Aye. Mhm. Since your grannies don’t mind I’ll mibby see ye in a fortnight, but of course — ” (he tried to cheer her with a joke) “ — your mammy might want to give me to one of your sisters.” She cut him off.

He sighed and looked out. The clear sky was now patterned with clusters of saucerlike cloudlets, the remotest tinted pink by the evening sun. Beneath each was a house, in each house was at least one bedroom where he would be ecstatically welcome. He regretted leaving his work on the training programme but Jenny was right, he would work better if he relaxed first. He stared at a cloudlet beyond the wooded top of Bowerhope Law. Beneath was Bowerhope house, less than two miles away by the shore path. Two friendly sisters there had been kind to him more than once. Their private names were Myoo and Myow and they always bedded together. He called their room at Bowerhope and said, “Myow?”

“Myoo.”

“Colonel Wat Cat is coming, pussies.”

“Mwoopee.”

When he reached the path to Bowerhope shadows were darkening under the trees but there was a soft glow in the sky and on the loch. The path was level and without abrupt turnings. Sophia, refreshed by rest and good feeding at the Warrior house, went at a satisfying pace. Wat, happy in his destination, gave himself to more thought about the training programme.

Men usually became soldiers through a disciplined extension of war games they had played as children, but many of the world’s best fighters, like himself, had come late to the army after work with other things, perhaps because delay had strengthened their determination. He would soon command the first determined army of late starters the world had seen since Cromwell’s in the historical era. Then he remembered George Washington’s troops — Napoleon’s generals — Ulysses S. Grant — Leon Trotsky — Che Guevara. The world would be watching him with these in mind, a wonderful, fearful thought! He prevented excitement by thinking how to work harder and set better examples than the trainee officers lent by neighbouring clans, though these would all be good men. He thought of Archie Crook Cot, a famous physicist, intelligent man, very good speaker. His muscular strength and coordination were better than his bulky body suggested. Like many gurus he relaxed by hunting and fishing and had gained local fame by it. Archie would adapt fast to war games and must already be imagining himself general of Ettrick. Wat smiled and muttered, “No yet Archie. Let’s see you after your first wee war.” He would manage Archie by giving him tough assignments and, if he handled them well, by promoting him. He would ask him, even now, to pick a company of volunteer divers and bring the Ettrick standard back from the North Sea. This would show Colonel Dryhope in command from his first day in office, and delight Ettrick traditionalists, and soothe Crook Cot’s vanity. Wat raised his wristcom to call Archie and saw the dial was lightless except for the word BEAMBLOCKED. He shook and tapped it, wondering why it gave such an impossible reason for malfunction. Beams were directed from satellites by human agencies. In a squabble between two satellites for a habitat zone a mischief maker had once temporarily blocked a rival’s part of network, the nearest thing to lawless fighting humanity had known for over a century, but nobody, however mischievous, used interplanetary energies to play a prank on someone’s wrist communicator.

Suddenly his ear was teased by the repetition of a sound no louder than the lapping of small waves on the shore to his left: an occasional soft tinkle from the wooded slope on his right. Looking there he saw a glowing violet spot travelling against darkness under the branches: obviously (he thought) an oddly coloured public eye many yards away. With another soft tinkle it floated out in front of his face. It was a bubble less than half an inch across with a violet outline and contained a head with abundant black shoulder-length hair and a womanly face, though too small to be recognized. He stared sternly at a point above it and heard a tiny, distinct very girlish English voice which became tough American then huskily Germanic. Throughout these accent shifts it remained mockingly, whorishly female and roused him in a way he detested.

“Please don’t ignore me sir, I am the fairy Tinker Bell who will make all your dreams come true, but you can call me Phyllis Marlowe. I’m a private eye, not a public eye and I’m absolutely and utterly yours, darlink.”

“Fuck off,” said Wat coldly, “I’m giving no interviews to crack-brained voyeurs, public or private.”

The bubble recoiled as if struck and settled on Sophia’s head between the ears. These twitched as the small voice shrilled, “Ooooooo why are you so crooooooel to me?” and made sounds like bitter sobbing. Sophia did not alter her pace. Wat urged her into a jolting trot which was the fastest she could go but the bubble stayed between her ears.

“I’ll tell you a story, dearie,” said a voice amazingly like a Scottish granny’s, “There was once a wee lad who didnae like the lassies of Ettrick and ordinary war games, he liked wild historical wars that were fought without rules and changed the world, wars fought with wild glamorous women and explosions and spaceships which carried him to new worlds. In sentimental moments he also enjoyed gardening, so he decided to be a star seeder.”

“A third of humanity starts that way,” said Wat scornfully.

“This boy was unique, dearie. He was taller than the rest and ashamed of it because he thought women couldnae like him — and he certainly didnae want any poor lassie who did. That’s why he wanted new worlds, worlds where he would not be an outsider because he dominated them. He also had the smeddum to work hard at what he hated, so he must have been terribly unhappy. After three painful years of keyboard work he knew enough astrophysics and biology to get into space, though his mind was not exactly scientific. Two years in satellite greenhouses ended his love of gardening. A talk with an immortal ended his dream of reaching new worlds — he could only do that by forgetting childhood dreams. He came home, became a soldier like his daddy and is now a world-famous hero. That won’t content him.”

“Tell me what I don’t know.”

“Oui, at our next meeting, chéri,” the voice whispered with a French accent, “The meeting where we become love-ers.”

Wat laughed. He seldom noticed comic situations but this seemed one. He looked at the bubble in a friendly way. It now contained a mouth with full lips precisely crimsoned in a 1940s Hollywood fashion which had been revived at least thrice a century since. He said, “As you’re synthesized from the soundtracks of ancient movies I won’t get much joy from that meeting. You’re probably not even a woman. Real women don’t use satellite technology to seduce a man.”

There was a pause in which he let Sophia resume the pace she found easiest. The voice said, “An intelligent deduction, Colonel Dryhope, but I am very much a woman. This sophisticated foreplay ensures we will meet in the body without inhibitions, but it is your soul I want to seduce.”

The voice now sounded like a soft-speaking south-east English woman with a slight exotic flavour of Caribbean or southern U.S.A. Wat had heard it before. He said amiably, “Why do you want that?”

A man’s voice spoke. It took Wat a few seconds to recognize his own.

“Give me a period of excitement when folk thought they were making a better world … Rage, not sorrow is my disease … I hate women for their damnable smug security … I want the bad old days when wars had no rules and bombs fell on houses and men and women died together like REAL equals! Equal in their agony and mutilation! … Privacy and power, power and privacy.”

Wat felt pressure in his heart and eardrums. He breathed carefully to prevent useless rage. He pretended to yawn then said that using satellite technology to invade private lives was the sort of criminal intrusion the world had outgrown over a century ago, was against the Geneva Convention, was infantile bad manners.

“Yeah, but I’m a real wild child and an outlaw, honey,” said the voice Americanly, “I’m a professional hooker who has hooked you.”

“You’re also a media person. You spoke to me in your English voice from a public eye ball this morning, one that jumped out of a blaeberry bush when I came down by Thirlstane. How can you be public and private too?”

“How can you be Colonel Dryhope in Ettrick Warrior house and your aunties’ Wattie at home? Media people also get into more than one set, Colonel Dryhope. The more sets we belong to the more power we hold. I’m in more than a dozen and am now forming the most powerful set in the world. It has two members — you and me.”

“I’ll discuss this chat with Archie Crook Cot,” said Wat grimly, “You may have heard of him. I don’t think he’ll need more than an hour of networking to find the beam you’re using, and where you are, and who you are.”

For a while the lips stayed slightly parted. Their owner was either thinking hard or listening to instructions from someone else, but Wat did not feel outnumbered.

“I would feel very hurt if you told Archie Crook Cot about me, Colonel Dryhope,” said the mouth at last, “Others would suffer too. You are not a man who can be frightened, but your clan might suffer most.”

“I’m no feart of mysterious threats,” said Wat grinning, “Nor feart of people who repeat things I said idly or in a bad temper. Why not replay what I said before the battle when I spoke to save the Ettrick weans? Geneva noticed that.” “That is not the side of you which attracts me,” said the mouth softly, “Do you not know that many women desire to feel themselves helpless in the arms of a powerful man they identify with God?”

“If you’re a masochist in search of a violent brute find another soldier. The breed is not extinct.”

“Ah, but you are so wrong, chéri! The breed is practically extinct. Other soldiers waste their violence in conventional war games then go home to be nursed by their conventional aunts and sweethearts. And I am more than a sensual body — I too am an outsider who cannot bear this world governed by aunts and grannies. It has lasted too long, it is stale, it needs renewal. You feel this too, Wat — that is why you wanted to start a reich of two with Annie Craig Douglas. It would have been too small for you. Renew the world with me! It will be dangerous work but neither of us fear danger. It will also need political intelligence.”

“Rhetoric!” said Wat impatiently, “If you’ve a concrete proposal, Ms. Media, propose it in sensible modern language. The adjective political became meaningless a century and a half ago.”

“If you stay silent about this meeting …” said the mouth slowly, “… I will propose to you tomorrow.”

“When?”

“When you return to the Warrior house. Promise to be silent till then.”

“I promise nothing. I won’t speak of this till we’ve met. Let that content you.”

The bubble swooped to his right ear and whispered, “Have you ever fucked a media bitch or do you only do it to pussies?”

“Neither bitches nor bubbles.”

“If you gossip about this we will never meet in the flesh, chéri. You will also lose the chance to recreate the world in the image of your wildest dreams — and quickly! Bonsoir. I will now vanish with a most melodious twang but remember, I hear every word you say and love most the words you fear to say. Our lovemaking will be different than with others. It will strengthen, not relax you. I will teach you not to be ashamed.”

He turned in time to see the bubble vanish with a melodious twang.

It was now after sunset but a silvery scatter of pebbles showed the path. The digits on his wristcom were glowing again. He dialled Archie Crook Cot and asked if he would organize the retrieval of the standard, taking the veteran General Megget and three Boys’ Brigade captains with him to show it was an Ettrick Warrior business. Archie Crook Cot, sounding pleased, said yes, he had been worrying about the standard. He would also take Jimsy Henderland (an excellent diver) and start early. Wat told him to use the Warrior house sky sledges but contact General Shafto first, then hesitated and said, “Report to me at once when you return.”

He switched off, wondering if he would regret not having given Archie a more technical job right away. Soon after he saw the lights of Bowerhope. He was enthusiastically welcomed but it was not a satisfying visit. Myoo said, “Getting colonelized has weakened you, Wat Dryhope. You don’t seem with us.”

Our dreams review events of the waking day, working them into the pattern of early memories and wishes which is our character. Wat dreamed easily about his squabble with Annie because he expected young girls to be bothersome. His triumphal arrival at the Warrior house and swift promotion to commander also fitted his dreams; he had not expected it but early efforts had prepared him for it. Nothing had prepared him for the conversation on the path to Bowerhope. His dreams turned nasty and woke him long before dawn. He lay perfectly still, unwilling to rouse the friendly bodies he lay between, unable to rest for troublesome thoughts.

He thought first about people in public eye companies. Broadcasters of war games clearly enjoyed getting close to bloodshed without being hurt. A woman of that sort with a taste for tall graceless carnaptious soldiers could easily use public equipment to contrive private meetings with them. But Wat’s movements had been followed, his words recorded and edited for at least five days before a blocking beam had isolated him from the intelligence network. Through a unique device he had been told that here and now between Myoo and Myow he was still being surveyed. No single person could use so much energy for a private purpose without being noticed as a selfish waster and interrupted. Since the media bitch did not fear interruption she must be part of a team making a programme about him. This broke the first rule in the bill of human rights: NOBODY WILL BE USED BY ANOTHER WITHOUT KNOWING AND WILLING IT. But a team breaking this rule must be working in secret, and secret societies (like governments, stock exchanges, banks, national armies, police forces, advertising agencies and other groups who made nothing people needed) had ended with the historical era. The modern intelligence net was open to everyone. It could only be used secretly by people arousing no curiosity, yet the media bitch had deliberately aroused his. What could such people want that they could not get openly? The earliest Christian churches, the Freemasons and Trade Unions had been secret societies. They believed all good people were equal in the eyes of God or natural justice, so unjust governments had banned them. Big governments later created their own secret societies, the F.B.I., C.I.A., K.G.B.D., M.I.5 which lied and tortured, robbed and killed in ways their employers could publicly deny. And people had been robbed and killed by Al Capone’s mob, the Mafia and the I.R.A. which were also secret forms of government. Wat’s head ached with efforts to imagine reasons for secrecy on an earth whose largest government was the family and where each family had what it needed.

After a few seconds he left the bed by creeping carefully to the foot. By the glowing calendar on a screen he saw Myoo and Myow roll into the space he had left and embrace each other without wakening. He softly tapped a message regretting his poor response to their welcome and asking if one of their children would return his pony to Dryhope common. Then he dressed and left by a door onto the veranda.

After a few steps on the shore path under the trees his foot struck something soft. He stopped and peered. There was not much light in the sky but the path was pale enough to show a small black body near the toe of his right sandal and two or three others irregularly placed on the path ahead: booby traps? Stooping down he saw the nearest body thrust a limb backward and lurch an inch forward.

“Have more fun than I did,” he told it and walked on taking care where he placed his feet. A minute later he said, “Whoever hears me may like to know that my last remark was addressed to a puddock. This is the night of the year when puddocks trek to the nearest fresh water for their annual nooky fair; but I doubt if natural history interests you Ms. Bitch. Are you listening? No need to speak; a tiny tinkle will do for yes, silence for no.”

He listened and heard only leaves and water stirred by the pre-dawn breeze. The anger which had come to him on that path four hours earlier returned. In a sing-song voice he said, “I think I’ll tell my friend Archie that someone’s using a vast amount of public energy for a private seduction.”

His wristcom worked as usual while he dialled the first Crook Cot digits, then it buzzed briefly like an angry wasp and the soft English voice said quickly, “What’s a puddock?”

“I’ve forgotten the English word but the French is crapaud,” said Wat, looking at a row of zeroes on the dial where the source of a message was usually indicated, “You sound like a woman who’s just been wakened. There must be at least two of you listening.”

“You are being tracked,” said the voice, yawning slightly, “By a sensor beam linked to my wristcom. It shocked me awake with the first word you spoke.”

“When will we meet?”

“Before you leave the path. Meanwhile I’ll amuse you with a suggestive poem.

The times are racked with birth pangs. Every hour

Brings forth some gasping Truth,

But Truth new born oft looks misshapen,

The terror of the household and its shame —

A Monster coiling in the mother’s lap

That she would starve or strangle,

yet it breathes,

And suckled at a hundred half-clad breasts

Comes slowly to its form, staggers erect,

Smooths the rough ridges of its Dragon scales,

Changes to shining locks its snaky hair,

And moves transfigured into angel guise,

Welcomed by all who cursed its hour of birth.

— What do you think of that?”

“Not much. The stale imagery suggests the nineteenth century. Was it written by someone heralding socialism?”

“It was written by an American judge heralding fascism.”

“Isms are the dullest bits of the historical midden. Why resurrect them?”

“Because we are about to give birth to the future and I am an agent of Shigalyovism which is organizing a political renaissance. But since sex comes before politics here is a wee song to cheer ye on your way, dearie.”

He heard a burst of orchestral music and a Scottish male voice from the start of the twentieth century sang —

Keep right on to the end of the road,

Keep right on to the end!

Though the way be long

Let your heart be strong,

Keep right on round the bend!

Though you’re tired, and weary,

Still journey on

Till you come to your happy abode,

Where all you love, you’ve been dreaming of,

Will be there — at the end — of the …”

“You’re scaring the puddocks!” yelled Wat, vainly trying to switch off his wristcom and walk faster at the same time. He could see an orange brightness low down among the trees ahead. The voice went huskily seductive: “You’re a mean old daddy but you’re out of sight Wat honeyprick, come to momma you sweetcocking motherfucker, come into me you big bad world beater, I am the shining cunt at the end of your personal tunnel.”

The orange light came from the glowing dome of a small tent with the shadow of a reclining, beckoning figure inside. He stooped and crawled in through an opening at the edge of the path. She lay on a bank of pillows in the rape-inviting position imposed on Jane Russell by a millionaire who had owned some of 1944 Hollywood. She moaned, “Don’t look at me like that you piece-a-shit!”

Two minutes later he lay gasping beside her after the fastest fuck of his life.

She said, “Do you know me now?”

He stared. Under the cosmetics (smudged now) of her archaic sexual mask he saw a young, very boyish face regard him alertly. He shook his head. She sighed and said, “I thought I was famous but of course you don’t use public eyes.”

He was too near to see her long body, slender waist, big breasts, but he felt them and was so disconcerted by her intense gaze (one blue eye, one brown) that he tried to lose it by again kissing and embracing but, “That’s all for now,” she said sitting upright, “Short brutish sex is the only sort revolutionaries have time for. When the present state withers away nobody will have time for the other sort either. A drink.” Sitting cross-legged on the pillows she lifted a box from under one and took out a bottle of champagne and a glass. She said, “You still prohibit yourself alcohol?”

“Aye.”

“Drink this.”

She handed him a thermos flask which proved to contain scalding black coffee. He poured a cupful into the cap and let it cool, watching her closely and puzzling over what she had said about sex. Was she mad? She astonished him by how easily and quickly she fired the champagne cork out through the low doorway, and caught a fuming jet of liquor in the glass, and sipped it while putting the bottle back in the box and taking out a cigarette case. Nan’s domestic actions had the same deft composure but not this alarming speed. He felt a thrumming in his blood, an expansion of breathing which were his usual reactions to danger. With relief he decided that his bodily chemistry was making him as alert as she. He was careful not to change his expression. He decided to say little and listen hard, yet she sat watching him and smiling at him and sipping champagne in such perfect silence that he was the first to speak.

“What’s your name?”

“Puddock if you like me, Delilah if I’m a ball-breaker. Smoke one of these Hawaii Gold. It will clear your head and ease you into the plot.” She spoke with the left side of her mouth while putting a lighter to a couple of slim brown tubes in the right. When he refused she unhesitatingly chucked one out through the entrance while inhaling the other, then sipped from the glass and in a voice that slid through several accents said, “Achtung Liebling! This is the situation. Many in the public eye are bored frantic by broadcasting the same old war games. The viewing public are also bored — that is why chieftains like your father have been bidding for attention by squandering more and more lives. The warriors too are bored. I won’t remind you how, in a young girl’s arms, you prayed for homes to be bombed and women to be mutilated. I’ll repeat something said by a general of the old school six days ago.”

She touched her wristcom and a moment later Wat heard Shafto say, “People are tired of the old strategies. In a month or three you and me should put our heads together and see if we can work out other new strategies — within the Geneva Conventions of course.”

“Fuck the Global and Interplanetary Council for War Regulation Sitting in Geneva!” said the woman with startling violence, “For ten thousand years of civilization mankind put its most creative energies into warfare, breaking old rules and inventing new ones every century, killing greater and greater multitudes in a crescendo of holocausts which kept pace with the enormous expansion of humanity. The world leaders called it progress of course, though they usually found it wiser to pretend that warfare was a temporary part of it. The wisest knew it was an essential part. Why purse your lips? Do you think me a monster?”

“I think you’re a clown,” said Wat, shrugging,

“That civilized way of living and fighting nearly wrecked the planet.”

“I agree,” she said, refilling her glass, “That the twentieth and twenty-first centuries played games that nearly destroyed everything animal but the cockroaches. Yes, a peaceful century of fighting-by-rule was needed to restore human resources. The eighteenth century was a bit like ours. European rulers feared the chaotic wars of an earlier age so their armies only fought at frontiers. Polite people toured each other’s nations, visited each other’s homes whether their governments were warring or not. Those Europeans thought they were safer than the Imperial Romans, but boom! 1789! The French Revolution! A new age of warfare started which spread competing nations to every part of the globe. The biggest nation of all, the Chinese, tried to keep out of that rat race so the cocky wee Europeans and Yanks pulled it apart. Our rational Utopia is about to go boom and fall apart too and you, Wat Dryhope, are the virus of the plague which is going to destabilize it. Prost, skol and slainte you world-fucker. I’ll soon want more of you.” “You foul-mouthed big blethering nonsense!” said Wat, amused. She smiled unpleasantly and said, “If you used the public eye you would know that what happened in Ettrick yesterday is happening now on the sunny side of the globe. In the Americas and Asias scholars, gurus, gardeners and artists are crowding to their Warrior houses. Armies are doubling and trebling. The world’s great new war hero, Wat Dryhope, came to soldiering late in life, why should every man not do it? Your coffee’s getting cold.”

Wat, thinking hard, sipped it then said, “That’s no sign of instability! It just shows how widespread male boredom is. The commanders will cope by conferring with Geneva and devising new rules for bigger war games. A lot more men will die, of course, but even if three quarters of male humanity slaughter each other it won’t destroy the modern state. The modern state depends on women minding their houses.”

“Have you forgotten that I am a woman? I am also an agent of the Shigalyovite Revolution.” “You are an eloquent, erudite liar, Delilah Puddock,” said Wat, chuckling, “Tell me about Shigalyovism.”

“You are a man I will enjoy humiliating, Wat Dryhope,” said the woman dreamily inhaling her cigarette yet still watching him closely, “Shigalyov was a Russian who loved freedom and plotted against the Czar. He proved by algebra that freedom can only be fully enjoyed in a world where one tenth of the people are given unrestricted powers over the remaining nine tenths.”

“The poor man must have been so obsessed with Czardom that Russian Communism was the only alternative he could imagine,” said Wat, screwing the empty cap back on the flask,

“Will your conspiracy bring back that?”

“O no, Russian Communism was dull and inefficient. We will recreate the system which overpowered it, the competitive exploitation of human resources.”

“Are human resources people?”

“Of course, but when exploiting people it is best to think them a passive substance like oil or earth.”

“You havenae said a word of practical sense,” said Wat, suddenly noticing he was no longer alert. His thoughts, his words also were coming ponderously: “You can only exploit folk … who depend on you for essential things like … food or ways of getting it … Landlords and merchants used to do that by removing food from folk who produced it … You could then deal it out to them in such wee amounts that … that poor folk grew too weak to grab it for themselves, especially when you employed a well-paid police force … Then … then the producers would lick your boots and c … cut each other’s throats hoping you’ll give them enough to let their w … wea … WEANS STAY ALIVE WHY’RE YE NODN AN GIGGLIN?”

Sweating and trembling he fell back on the pillows. She flung cigarette and glass out onto the path (he heard it smash) and knelt upright across his thighs.

“You really do understand political economy,” she said, putting her hands beneath her breasts, lifting them and smiling down on him between. “That’s all past,” he whispered, appalled to feel his penis swell, erect, yearn up to her while the rest of him helplessly shivered. She said, “Time for more, my wee Sssscottish Ressssource.”

Caressing her nipples slowly with her thumbs she crooned, “The bright old day now dawns again, the cry goes through the land, in England there shall be dear bread — in Ireland, sword and brand; and poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, so rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, of the fine old English Tory days; hail to the coming time! Spurs on the dinnerplates! Guns before butter! If you had shared my champers and pot you would be enjoying this but the doctored coffee won’t sssspoil my pleasure Ssssamson.”

Grabbing his hair with both hands she eased herself down on him whispering, “George Orwell said the future of humanity would be a jackboot continually stamping on a face. He was wrong. It’s gonna be me continually fucking your brains out.”

Wat obstinately closed his eyes. She opened them with her thumbs. He deliberately emptied his mind of thoughts and lost consciousness after some helpless, shameful intervals of pain and pleasure and wakened still helpless and shivering but on his feet. He was upright because his arm was over the shoulder of a robust presence who also grasped him round the waist. There was a big brown animal nearby. Some pale blobs before him were probably faces.

“Careful, Colonel Dryhope! Take it easy sir!” said Jenny’s voice.

He was on the shore of Saint Mary’s Loch on a cold grey morning with sharp aches in his head and testicles and muscles. Jenny was supporting him. Nearby his father’s horse, Bucephalus, stood on the path under the trees, sniffing among pebbles at broken glass and a crushed cigarette. Women from Bowerhope were in front of him. Myoo laid her hand tenderly on his shoulder and said sadly, “Oh Wattie lad, you look awfy sick.”

“How came your clothes in that fankle?” asked Myow beside her and Wat noticed his clothes felt dirty and ill-fitting. He realized Delilah Puddock must have put them on him while he lay unconscious and before she removed the tent. This provoked two feelings he knew to be insane: gratitude so maudlin that it brought tears to his eyes; a sadistic lust to punish her so urgent that it made his testicles ache worse than ever. He groaned and said, “I’m sick, aye, but don’t ask what happened. I need Kittock.”

“There are many messages for you at the Warrior house Colonel.”

“Send them to Dryhope but first help me onto this bloody big horse.”

HE DISMOUNTED on Dryhope common, stabled Bucephalus and went through the garden without seeing a soul. He was thankful but puzzled, then realized that if Bowerhope had warned the Dryhope mother of his filthy and disordered appearance she would certainly have organized a party or expedition to move the children where they would not see him. She had also made the walls of the house opaque except for a line of clear portholes under the eaves. As he approached the veranda she was waiting for him there and said sternly, “What hit ye? Have ye been pioneering in the woods? Is this the result of alfresco fucking?”

“Aye, but not how ye think. Where are the bairns?”

“Off to watch the circus being pitched on the hills round Selkirk. The aunts and a few grannies have gone with them.”

Standing on the path beneath her he said, “I’m coming no nearer till nurses have seen me. Mibby I’m infected with something.”

“Aye? Well, they’re waiting for you.”

He walked round the path to the infirmary door. It was ajar. He mounted the veranda and entered.

Two nieces, a sister and a cousin swiftly undressed him and were shocked by the sight of his body. They said, “Naebody in Ettrick makes love like that!” and, “Were you playing soldiers with a queer man, Wat?”

“No.”

“Was it a gangrel lass?”

“No.”

“Was it a circus woman?”

“Mibby. She said she was famous but I didnae ken her. Be quick with this.”

One cleaned his body and put lotions on the wounds. The others took samples of his breath, blood, lymph, urine and (by an exertion which almost had him screaming) semen. They analyzed the samples and keyed the results into the network while he was shaved and massaged by hands which expertly avoided the bites and bruises. One told him, “Your brother Joe is a lot cheerier. Annie Craig Douglas visited him last night. She’s still with him.”

“Good.”

“She says her mother sent her — Nan, ye ken? — but I think Annie would like to see you.”

“I’ll see naebody till I’ve seen Kittock.”

“You can see her as soon as you’ve dressed and had your medicine,” said another handing him a diagnostic printout.

It said Wat Dryhope’s excellent constitution had been exhausted by at least nine days of intense muscular and nervous exertion, by opiate overdose from a cocktail of caffeine-lavoured chloroform water plus heroin plus alcohol plus cocaine plus L-dopa aphrodisiac, also by a common and harmless throat infection which only afflicted the exhausted. For the exhaustion it prescribed a fortnight of mild activity, sauna baths and massage; for the narcotic poisoning, detoxification with naloxone and total avoidance of all stimulants including caffeine; for the throat infection, a syrup of squill liquid extract and capsicum tincture, one spoonful after meals. A nurse went to order these medicines from the powerplant. In a puzzled way Wat re-read the diagnosis.

“A few hours ago I was in the worst fever of my life,” he said, frowning, “My heart was hammering and the sweat lashing off me, but I don’t remember coughing. Are ye sure I’ve just a throat infection?”

“No, Wat, we’re too ignorant, but the network is sure. The network has records of every virus that ever mutated naturally, along with those invented by murderous governments and business corporations in the bad old days. It knows all viruses that have evolved on the satellites and the planets, all viral mutations which could possibly happen in the last three weeks and next ten days. You’re safe, Wattie. Your fever was a sober body’s healthy reaction to bad drugs in your coffee. I hope you gave the bitch as good as you got.”

“Here’s a billet doux from her!” cried one of his nieces triumphantly, returning from Wat’s room with clean clothing and a rainbow-coloured ticket which she waved above her head, “I found this and a book about shaking the world while emptying his dirty pockets. It’s for tonight’s circus and on the back it says — ”

“Gie’s it!” yelled Wat so fiercely that she stuck out her tongue at him, threw the clothes into his lap, dropped the ticket on top. He lifted it and read with the other nurses peering over and round his shoulders.

Cher Liebling!

NOTES ON THE PROLOGUE

Page IX

Alasdair Gray is a fat old asthmatic Glaswegian who lives by painting and writing. His other books include Lanark, Unlikely Stories Mostly, 1982 Janine, The Fall of Kelvin Walker, Lean Tales (with James Kelman and Agnes Owens), Old Negatives (verse), McGrotty & Ludmilla, Something Leather, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland, Poor Things and The Ends of Our Tethers

First published in Great Britain in 1994 by