“As you explained it,” the Captain said, “I could save those men myself.” He laughed. “And not only myself—but any of the men in that cart.”

  “For Christ’s mercy and love,” Bates said. His mind was dry. He had the feeling that he was missing something obvious, some form of words that would hold off this monstrous and offhand sentence of death.

  “The French, then?” the Captain asked again. “Your treachery?”

  Bates could feel the very pressure of his death upon his back. The predatory raptor-claws in his flesh. It was a real pressure, as if the medieval sketches that showed angels and devils upon men’s shoulders and whispering in their ears were given literal life. The tiny devil hissed Run! Run! in his ear. It was so real Bates fancied he could even hear it. But to run and be shot in the back—it was too terrible a thought.

  “This disease is a weapon of war,” said Captain Longley. “You said so yourself. Ergo the French concocted it. The fact that you know so much about it,” he shook his head. “That very fact condemns you as a spy, my dear fellow. Cheeks—” And pursuant to his commanding officer’s orders Cheeks raised his rifle again, and sighted down the barrel at Bates’s chest. And this time he was not playing. Bates, trying to think of something to say, as if thinking of something to say were the most important thing in the world, could think of nothing. Nothing at all. And the finger squeezed the trigger.

  11

  The sky was amber, streaked with purples and blues. Eleanor watched a great seizure in the English lines. Horseman prancing ho and ho, up and down the lines, and men gathering their weapons and trotting back up the hill. The French charged down the middle, but were repulsed by cannonfire and an unyielding phalanx of red. But as the French jarred back and withdrew this same phalanx retreated too, in order. The central ground of the battle was emptied, and as the French regrouped the English cannon began laying out rows of feathery smoke, and churning up the turf and steaming gouts out of the river.

  “The assault heroic,” said the giant, in a mournful voice.

  “I do not understand,” said Eleanor. “Are the inhabitants of this airship here merely to observe this battle? Why did they pluck you from the field?”

  “And you with me.”

  “Did they intend to take me?”

  “I mediate.” The Brobdingnagian gestured by slowly uncoiling an immense finger. “Those—”

  In the bleary and white distances of this huge space Eleanor could make out the huge figures; three, or maybe more of them—for, strange to say, their very size, and the very fact of there being nothing but clear air between her and them, somehow obscured their details. They were too large for the brain to apprehend them. Great round-bellowed giants, but somehow not.

  “They are the masters of this craft,” said Eleanor.

  “Not they.”

  “No?”

  “They are beings twelve times my size,” said the Giant. “But the master of this craft is greater, far, than that. Twenty thousand and more.”

  “Did you say thousand?”

  “Twenty thousand.”

  “Where is he?”

  “We are upon him. This is the suit of clothes he wears. This is the manner of his giant steps about the cosmos. He is an explorer. I can speak to those great beings, and they can speak to him. Or so I surmise.”

  After a moment, Eleanor said: “It is hard to comprehend the existence of so large a being.”

  The giant said nothing.

  She was hungry, and roamed about the white floor for some time. And, to her surprise, she found food: long stems of white grass growing upon a fold or ridge of the floor. They smelt sweet, in a distant way, and when Eleanor tried one she was surprised how well they tasted. She explored her immediate area, climbed the strange hillocks, peered into the vast white distances all around. Plain fluid ran in perfectly straight lines, eight such lines in parallel rows. She tested the fluid; it was water, or something very like. It attended to her thirst, at any rate, although after she drank she felt a little elated, or heady.

  The giant was stretched out on his back and seemed to be sleeping.

  Then the sky rang like a low gong, and Eleanor felt a tremor pass through her feet. She dropped where she was and tried to summon up an image on the floor; but this portion of the strange space did not seem to function after that manner. So she ran over the pliant whiteness to where the giant lay. “Sir Giant!” she cried. “Sir Giant!”

  There was another shudder.

  Here, where she had been before, she pressed her palm into the floor and the image coalesced in the magic substance. She scanned the land below. The image that first greeted her was of thousands of faces—English soldiers looking up, directly at her. Then, with perfect co-ordination, they all cheered: mouths flying open and eyes widening, some of them raising arms and fists.

  There was another shudder.

  She moved her godlike eye through the air. There, briefly, she saw a flash on the horizon; and caught the briefest glimpse of a blot, flying faster through the air than any bird. The cannonball.

  “They have begun an assault upon this place!” she exclaimed. There was none to answer her, or to heed her words.

  All around her the life inside this bizarre place seemed unconcerned. Although each detonation brought palpable shudders through the whole structure, none of the strange inhabitants seemed perturbed. She leapt to her feet and climbed a nearby eminence and observed. As she became more accustomed to the scale of her surroundings, she found herself able to make out more and more detail. The space curved up and round, and what she had first taken for uniform whiteness revealed itself, on closer examination, to be a patchwork of creams and pales. In addition to the hyper-giants, lumbering round-bodied types, were a dozen or so Brobdingnagians; some lying, and some standing about with puzzled expressions. But then, with a physical jolt, she saw that what she had taken for fields of waving grasses were in fact hordes—crowds of human-sized albino people flowing hither and thither on who knew what strange purpose.

  The cannonade seemed to have finished.

  Eleanor ate some more of the sweet grasses and refreshed herself at one of the queerly regular streams. The water, she noted, flowed out from a lip a hundred yards away, ran straight without the benefit of grooves or runnels, and disappeared into a sort of mesh several hundred yards further away.

  The Brobdingnagian—her Brobdingnagian, as she thought of him—was sitting up; his head like a watchtower, his shoulders like buttresses. She went over to him.

  “Sir Giant,” she asked. “This craft has travelled between the very planets themselves?”

  “And more,” he grumbled.

  “Why does it not move now? Why does its pilot permit it to be shot upon?”

  The giant said nothing.

  “Sir Giant,” said Eleanor, her voice trembling. “I am afraid I will never again reach my home. Can I disembark? How can I leave this place? Am I prisoned here for ever?” She felt a welling up inside her, and tears started to come. Tears.

  In sympathetic convulsion, the whole craft began to shudder once again.

  “They bombard again,” said the giant.

  Time seemed to flow differently here. She could not say how, exactly, except that there was some pulsing quality, some sluggishness to her heartbeat and her breathing. Some otherness to the light. No, not her heart, nor her breathing; but the hourglass sifting of the granules of her thought. The throb of memory succeeding memory. Her father, white as this world, and breathing out. Her mother. Christmas cards strung on a smiling thread. The popgun percussion of a cab rattling down Poland street. A man’s face, smiling, and smiling at her. Which man? A water-blue sky, clouds of paint-daub white.

  Eleanor slept, briefly, but woke again. Something troubled her sleeping mind, and when she woke she cried out, for she was in clear space and falling into the night amongst stars. But it was the floor, transparenced again, although not by her hand.

  She leapt to her feet, fell, clambered up again. A vast expanse of ground had been made glassy, a huge oval of blackness cutting into the white surround. It was her Brobdingnagian: his huge hand, pressed flat against the floor, summoning the vista of the battlefield below. “They withdrew their fighting men,” he grumbled. “They hoped to bring Littlebig crashing down upon their enemies.”

  “To destroy the entire French army in one action,” said Eleanor. “I see—I see the tactical advantage of it, I mean.”

  “Now they sleep under their fabrics and, some of them, in the open air,” said the giant. He hummed, hoomed, and moved his hand slightly to bring the view out and round.

  “It is night. The sky eastward is paling,” said Eleanor, more to herself than to the giant. “Is war truly conducted after this manner? Like office business? Sleep the night, wake together, ready oneself and begin again the fighting?”

  “They will not wake again,” said the giant, sorrowful. It was not clear whether he had heard what Eleanor said.

  She felt the chill in her viscera. It did not so much as occur to her to doubt what the giant said.

  “So many men…” she started to say. And, with an afterthought, “and the Dean too!”

  The whole ground below them lit up with a firework shine of green. The shadows became ivy and vert-noir, the prominences vermilion and spring-green. The colour held. The weird illumination, like a cheap trick of stage-lighting except for its staggering scale and size, burned for many long seconds. Then it slowly faded. It flickered, for a time briefer than an eyelid-blink, a deep red and then it vanished. The ground was dark again.

  “That?” Eleanor breathed. And again, louder for the benefit of her companion, “What was that?”

  “An antivitalic,” said the giant, sonorously.

  Eleanor digested this fact, and sat down. Then, surprising herself utterly, she embarked upon a great series of wailing sobs, each hurrying so fast after the previous as to tread upon its heels, and all, like winter-storm waves hammering a supine shore, expressive of a desolation so profound it passed beyond, or beneath, all words. She had not known she had it in her. Her tears wet her face and her neck. Her tears came and came and felt to her as if they would never stop.

  12

  One thought, and only that, crossed Bates’s mind as Cheeks pulled his trigger. We perhaps think of thought as something that requires an extensive stretch of time in which to make itself manifest. But Bates was conscious of this thought all as a whole, an infolded rose-bloom of thought fully apprehensible in an instant: the same instant that Cheek’s finger curled in on itself and the ignition-cap sparked a hushing hiss of gunpowder inside the weapon. The thought had to do with infuriation and meaninglessness. It was, in effect: To have lived through so much—to have survived the plague that had killed so many, to have effected that profound connection with the one woman he would ever truly love, to be so close to a profound moment of consummation: to be there, in that place, almost in that place, and then to have it all severed. It was the roughness of it; the unpolished and irregular ugliness of it. Of all things death, surely, ought to mean. It ought to be the knot into which all life’s threads are bound. But it was wrong for those threads to be severed so random with a random sabre’s stroke.

  The rifle’s snap.

  Run! Run! cried the voice of death, small in his ear. Run where? Run out of this life and into the next. To discovery. The land of death, under its permanent cap of seventy-mile-thick ice. Into the tiniest, or the largest, of coffins. What running could he do?

  He opened his eyes.

  “Run! Go now!” called the voice.

  There was a commotion. Several voices were shouting. Cheeks was lying on his back and his face was all blooded. Blood flowed over his skin and over his uniform and laid its redness upon the green. His rifle lay in shreds of wood and metal at his side. Stupidly Bates stared, and stared. He turned, slowly, and looked up at the Captain, mounted on his horse. The Captain had his pistol out and was aiming directly at Bates.

  “Run!” Oh, it was a real voice. It was a voice in his ears.

  Then Bates took a step forward, stupidly, moving towards the Captain’s weapon. Then, the excitement bayoneting into his soul, he leapt back, and turned, and started to run. That pressure upon his shoulders was more than conscience.

  Run.

  Behind him he heard the pistol’s discharge, and hard upon the noise a woman’s scream, and he flinched in the expectation of the great blow of a pistol ball between his shoulder blades. But there was nothing, and he half-turned his head, still running staggeredly onwards, to glance back. The Captain sat on the ground, holding out his right hand towards Bates’s retreat, as if accusing. The Captain’s hand was gloved in blood. A glistening clump. His horse was cantering away in the opposite direction. The Captain was pointing at Bates with his stump—“After him!—After him!”

  Cheeks was lying on his back, very particularly not looking at the sky.

  The one remaining soldier looked over at his commanding officer with dismay—at his wound, or at the order, it wasn’t possible to say—and then launched into a rapid stride after Bates. He covered the ground alarmingly quickly. Bates put his face forward and reached as hard with his stride as he could.

  “Run!” He felt the weight of his conscience shift upon his shoulders.

  “But where?”

  “On!”

  “I am glad,” Bates panted, exhausted already, “that you are alive after all.”

  “Save your breath for running,” said Gugglerum.

  Bates ran. But the soldier was yelling at him, and the yells were coming rapidly closer. Bates panted. Why did his pursuer not fire his own weapon? Was it that he now had reason not to trust guns? They had malfunctioned, or been sabotaged. But this soldier would have a knife. And he would have crushing hands, capable of wringing Bates’s neck.

  And there! The fellow was upon him, grabbing both of Bates’s shoulders at once and pulling him back so that Bates’s legs kicked forwards in a way that would, were it not a matter of life and death, comical. Bates almost fell, struggled, kicked out again. And then there was a crac! and a crac!, and from where the fellow least expected it—from Bates’s own hair—two pellets shot out. The man reeled away screeching, palms to his eyes, and Bates wasted no time in picking himself up and running on. He ran towards the false moon, which now seemed larger than ever it had. Up the slope, and further up, and still the curving base of this celestial apparition did not come free from the land.

  He mounted the hill and got halfway up before he stopped. Each breath was wrested with intense effort from the air. But he was alive. The breath boomed in his chest.

  He felt Gugglerum shift across his left shoulder, coming from behind the curtain of hair and hauling himself round. “Come,” he said, directly into Bates’s ear. “There is no time to waste here.”

  With effort Bates pulled himself to his feet. “Your flying craft?”

  “Destroyed.”

  “Yet you survived?”

  “Yes.”

  “You blocked the rifle-barrel of…”

  “Yes.”

  “The Captain’s pistol?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. Mud and sorrowwort wrapped around a stone, with a little heat from the day, of course. Now, on!”

  Bates started into an uneven stride. “Are we to run to that…?” he gasped. He did not need to be more specific. Naught but the mendax luna could be called that in such a tone of voice. Now that he was over the top of the hill Bates could see how large a portion of the morning sky was occupied by the circle of it. It had come much closer to the Earth now. Morning light coming at it horizontally from the east gave it a weird almost convexity, rendered more optically disorientating by the odd scuffs and rents made by the previous night’s bombardments.

  “Why do I run?” he gasped, stopping to lean forward and stay his hands on his knees. “They are not, are not chasing…”

  “We have lost much time,” said the Blefuscan.

  “I cured the,” said Bates, sucking in big breaths, “I listened to your words, my friend. And from your words I learned the truth. I cured the sick soldiers.”

  “I have been attending,” said Gugglerum in his singsong voice. “I hid by the cart and watched you.”

  “And why do we hurry?”

  They were almost at the peak of the hill.

  “The comet the comet the comet,” said Gugglerum.

  “You were talking,” Bates said, hauling his right foot up and planting it saggily on the turf, pulling his left foot and planting it similarly, ratcheting his unfamiliar way up the hill, “of the people who are Lilliputians to your Lilliputians…”

  “Much smaller,” he said. “You misunderstand the logarithmus.”

  “The?”

  “The scale.”

  “Not a twelfth? Not a twelfth your size?”

  But they were at the top of the rise, and a terrible panorama had raised itself before their eyes in the valley below. The field of battle spread before them, but there were corpses, lying face-down, face-up, grasping at air with dead fingers, stretching their limbs out straight or curled like babbies, even, some of them, sitting—corpses everywhere. They were not bloodied, most of them. They were not blackened or scarred, not, most of them, even dirtied. They looked as if asleep.

  “Grief,” said Bates, in a reduced voice. “Lord. What has happened here?”

  Gugglerum clambered to stand on Bates’s shoulder, steadying himself with his hand on the back of his head.

  “They are dead. Are they all dead?”

  “They are all dead,” said the little man.

  “How?”

  “I do not know.”

  “But—” said Bates, starting forward, and then, in a risible fear of infection—worked into him by his recent experience, but out of place here—starting back. “But how are they all fallen? Is it the result of the battle, or…?”

  “I do not know.”