And so I stamp these stones, I walk this elevated way, I rub my hands and watch my breath like a warning go out before me, and can only wait.

I am cold; I gather phlegm in my throat and send it too towards the moat, then smile at that encircling water. There, like leaves scattered by the autumn wind, like those wasting cells again, and like the dispossessed who clogged up all our roads, I see the downward filtered, the long way travelled, the by that stream transported finches; the birds we shot and I lost, all dead and wet, bedraggled, cold and slowly turning in our sustaining ring of water. Our dead chicks, come home to roost at last.

Chapter 7

The night comes to the castle, and I return to sleep. My dreams, my dearest, take the same direction as my last conscious thoughts, turning to you, still unreturned. Such reveries tease from my mind the old, lascivious memories summoned up, swelling from the depths, by the mounting pleasures they recall.

I search for you in my dreams, stumbling through a landscape of desire where clouds and snowdrifts become pillows, a stroked cheek, pale heavy breasts. Submerging in hidden, fern fringed clefts, surrendering to the clinging pool and its sweetly bitter perfume, I see trees that rear, tumescent, from curved collected veins of roots; smooth fissured rocks in plunging gorges; rearing stems pulsing with sap and life; downy fruits, fallen and creviced; rifts cracked in the earth itself surrounded by stony crests and crowns, and become aware that every feature hides something craved. Worshipping before and lusting after, I find myself half lost, as though by your nature already partially infected.

I would possess this land; I want to take it, make it mine, but I cannot. The water remains water, nothing else, the towering trees stay just trees; fruits rot, and the stones, smooth and curved, seem to promise something if only they could be lifted, prized away… but they will not be moved.

I All that's to be done is toss and turn in this too big bed; before now, in similar circumstances, I would have ascended to a higher level and gone in search of a compliant maid or other servant with whom to while away the night, but we have only men left in our employ these days; nothing to excite in those hired hands.

Adrift on this raft of bed, I roll abandoned in my dreams like a ship without way, pitched and driven by swell and gust, your body a distant memory, like a misty glimpse of land.

Then, by a strange reversal, the image the reality creates. Our brave lieutenant has returned, and sent you to me, to creep quietly into my bed and slip between these sheets. I turn in my sleep and it turns into wakefulness; you kneel, then lie, still silent. I hold you close, my open one. You stare, half clothed, at the bed's dark canopy overhead. Light bipartisan, cast by the fire dying in the grate and a steady wash of moonlight pouring through one window exposes a flush upon your cheek. Your skin and hair are heady with the scent of open air, and your long black, let down hair hangs heavy and bejewelled with bits of twigs and torn scraps of leaves.

Your eyes have that broken, careless look I remember from

when first we met. Watching them from one side, I feel that now I see more in them than I have at any time since. Sometimes only the sideways view tells true; the selves, the faces we manufacture for the world to ease our passage through it are too used to frontal assault, and I think that I see more truth in you just now than ever I did enquiring straight. I suppose I should have known; what has our shared taste taught us if not that the interest's more, when taken oblique?

“Are you all right?” I ask.

You wait, then nod.

The lieutenant's men sound noisy in the yard; engines rattle down to silence, rifles fall, lights shiver beyond the drawn curtains, shouts echo round the castle's walls like voices from the stones, and the castle, more than we, seems to breathe around us.

I persist. “How did the day go?”

Another hesitation. “Well enough.”

“Is there anything you want to tell me?”

You shift your head minimally and look at me. “What would you like to know?”

“Where you've been. What happened.”

“I have been with Loot,” you tell me, looking away. I try to raise my hand to you, but it is caught beneath the tangled bedclothes. I have to shift across the bed, grunting, to free it from the knot of clothes. “We drove across to the hills on the far side,” you continue. I have my hand free now, but cannot raise the wrath to strike you. I may have ascribed you too much wit anyway. “… been with Loot.” It could have meant no more than the most innocent interpretation. And besides, I now recall, I have resolved not to be jealous. I smooth the now freed hand through my hair, then yours, loosing fragments of twigs to fall upon the pillow.

“Did anything happen?” I ask.

“They found a goat, tied to a stake in one farm. In another there was a tank of diesel which they tried to drain but could not. They shot the tank to fill some containers from the hole but discovered it held only water. There was a place they think was an orphanage, to the west. I had not beard of it. The children had all been crucified.”

“Crucified?” I ask, frowning.

“On telegraph poles. On the road outside. Twenty or more, all down the road. I lost count. I was crying.”

“Who could have done that?”

“They did not know.” You turn to me. “The next man they met on that road, they shot. All of them; all at once. He was walking away and had some cans of food they thought he must have taken from the orphanage. He said he had not noticed the children but they could see he was lying.”

“And after that?”

“They found a quarry in the hills, a dynamite store, but it was empty.”

“Then what?”

“They talked to people on the road; refugees. They threatened them but did not harm them, were told something they wanted to know. We went up into the hills, on a track. I think we passed the Anders” house. Some of them went ahead, taking horses from a farm there, and the rest went on foot. I was left with two of them at the jeeps. They all came back later without having found anything. It had been night for some time by then. Too dark.”

“And after that?”

“We made our way back. Oh, we crossed a bridge over the river, and there were boats with dead people in them; one of their scouts had seen them yesterday. “They dragged the boats ashore and hid them, in case they ever had to use them later. The dead people they let float down the river. That was on the way back here.”

“An eventful day.”

You nod. The fire throws wavering shadows across the ornately corniced ceiling and the dark, wood panelled walls.

“An eventful day,” you whisper, agreeing.

I say nothing for a while. “Were you all right?” I ask eventually. “Did the lieutenant treat you properly?”

You are silent for a long time. The fire shadows dance. Eventually, you say: “With all the deference and esteem that I have come to expect.”

I am not sure what to say. So I say nothing. I attend, instead, to our situation. Still you lie and I look, and watching, lying steady we remain, as though in that moment timeless.

But we are never so; my thoughts contradict their own genesis. Time itself is not timeless, much less us. We are willing victims of our own quickness, and, while the more elegant action might have been to turn my back, ignoring you, I did not. Instead I reached out, I made an effort, and for a chosen moment decided to decide no more, and, guided by a coarser, simpler layer of mind to act as well, reached over, gripped the bedclothes” edge, and covered you.

I dreamt of summer in my reinstated sleep, of a time, many years ago, when our liaison was new and fresh and still a secret, or so we thought, and you and I went on a picnic, riding horses to a distant meadow in the wooded hills.