Waiting for the Barbarians Read online

  I did not mean to get embroiled in this. I am a country magistrate, a responsible official in the service of the Empire, serving out my days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire. I collect the tithes and taxes, administer the communal lands, see that the garrison is provided for, supervise the junior officers who are the only officers we have here, keep an eye on trade, preside over the law-court twice a week. For the rest I watch the sun rise and set, eat and sleep and am content. When I pass away I hope to merit three lines of small print in the Imperial gazette. I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times.

  But last year stories began to reach us from the capital of unrest among the barbarians. Traders travelling safe routes had been attacked and plundered. Stock thefts had increased in scale and audacity. A party of census officials had disappeared and been found buried in shallow graves. Shots had been fired at a provincial governor during a tour of inspection. There had been clashes with border patrols. The barbarian tribes were arming, the rumour went; the Empire should take precautionary measures, for there would certainly be war.

  Of this unrest I myself saw nothing. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters. These dreams are the consequence of too much ease. Show me a barbarian army and I will believe.

  In the capital the concern was that the barbarian tribes of the north and west might at last be uniting. Officers of the general staff were sent on tours of the frontier. Some of the garrisons were strengthened. Traders who requested them were given military escorts. And officials of the Third Bureau of the Civil Guard were seen for the first time on the frontier, guardians of the State, specialists in the obscurer motions of sedition, devotees of truth, doctors of interrogation. So now it seems my easy years are coming to an end, when I could sleep with a tranquil heart knowing that with a nudge here and a touch there the world would stay steady on its course. If I had only handed over these two absurd prisoners to the Colonel, I reflect—“Here, Colonel, you are the specialist, see what you can make of them!”—if I had gone on a hunting trip for a few days, as I should have done, a visit up-river perhaps, and come back, and without reading it, or after skimming over it with an incurious eye, put my seal on his report, with no question about what the word investigations meant, what lay beneath it like a banshee beneath a stone—if I had done the wise thing, then perhaps I might now be able to return to my hunting and hawking and placid concupiscence while waiting for the provocations to cease and the tremors along the frontier to subside. But alas, I did not ride away: for a while I stopped my ears to the noises coming from the hut by the granary where the tools are kept, then in the night I took a lantern and went to see for myself.

  * *

  From horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow. It falls from a sky in which the source of light is diffuse and everywhere present, as though the sun has dissolved into mist, become an aura. In the dream I pass through the barracks gate, pass the bare flagpole. The square extends before me, blending at its edges into the luminous sky. Walls, trees, houses have dwindled, lost their solidity, retired over the rim of the world.

  As I glide across the square, dark figures separate out from the whiteness, children at play building a snowcastle on top of which they have planted a little red flag. They are mittened, booted, muffled against the cold. Handful after handful of snow they bring, plastering the walls of their castle, filling it out. Their breath departs from them in white puffs. The rampart around the castle is half built. I strain to pierce the queer floating gabble of their voices but can make out nothing.

  I am aware of my bulk, my shadowiness, therefore I am not surprised that the children melt away on either side as I approach. All but one. Older than the others, perhaps not even a child, she sits in the snow with her hooded back to me working at the door of the castle, her legs splayed, burrowing, patting, moulding. I stand behind her and watch. She does not turn. I try to imagine the face between the petals of her peaked hood but cannot.

  * *

  The boy lies on his back, naked, asleep, breathing fast and shallow. His skin glistens with sweat. For the first time the bandage is off his arm and I see the angry open sore it hid. I bring the lantern closer. His belly and both groins are pocked with little scabs and bruises and cuts, some marked by trickles of blood.

  “What did they do to him?” I whisper to the guard, the same young man as last night.

  “A knife,” he whispers back. “Just a little knife, like this.” He spreads thumb and forefinger. Gripping his little knife of air he makes a curt thrust into the sleeping boy’s body and turns the knife delicately, like a key, first left, then right. Then he withdraws it, his hand returns to his side, he stands waiting.

  I kneel over the boy, bringing the light close to his face, and shake him. His eyes open languidly and close again. He sighs, his rapid breathing slows. “Listen!” I say to him. “You have been having a bad dream. You must wake up.” He opens his eyes and squints past the light at me.

  The guard offers a pan of water. “Can he sit?” I ask. The guard shakes his head. He raises the boy and helps him to sip.

  “Listen,” I say. “They tell me you have made a confession. They say you have admitted that you and the old man and other men from your clan have stolen sheep and horses. You have said that the men of your clan are arming themselves, that in the spring you are all going to join in a great war on the Empire. Are you telling the truth? Do you understand what this confession of yours will mean? Do you understand?” I pause; he looks back vacantly at all this vehemence, like someone tired after running a great distance. “It means that the soldiers are going to ride out against your people. There is going to be killing. Kinsmen of yours are going to die, perhaps even your parents, your brothers and sisters. Do you really want that?” He makes no response. I shake his shoulder, slap his cheek. He does not flinch: it is like slapping dead flesh. “I think he is very sick,” whispers the guard behind me, “very sore and very sick.” The boy closes his eyes on me.

  * *

  I call in the only doctor we have, an old man who earns his livelihood pulling teeth and making up aphrodisiacs out of bonemeal and lizards’ blood. He puts a clay poultice on the sore and smears ointment on the hundred little stabs. Within a week, he promises, the boy will be able to walk. He recommends nourishing food and leaves in a hurry. He does not ask how the boy sustained his injuries.

  But the Colonel is impatient. His plan is to launch a swift raid on the nomads and take more prisoners. He wants the boy along as a guide. He asks me to release thirty of the garrison of forty to him and to provide mounts.

  I try to dissuade him. “With no disrespect, Colonel,” I say, “you are not a professional soldier, you have never had to campaign in these inhospitable parts. You will have no guide except a child who is terrified of you, who will say whatever comes into his head to please you, who is anyhow unfit to travel. You cannot rely on the soldiers to help you, they are only peasant conscripts, most of them have not been more than five miles from the settlement. The barbarians you are chasing will smell you coming and vanish into the desert while you are still a day’s march away. They have lived here all their lives, they know the land. You and I are strangers—you even more than I. I earnestly advise you not to go.”

  He hears me out, even (I have the feeling) leads me on a little. I am sure this conversation is noted down afterwards, with the comment that I am “unsound”. When he has heard enough he dismisses my objections: “I have a commission to fulfil, Magistrate. Only I can judge when my work is completed.” And he goes ahead with his preparations.

  He travels in his
black two-wheeled carriage, with camp-bed and folding writing-table strapped on the roof. I supply horses, carts, fodder and provisions for three weeks. A junior lieutenant of the garrison accompanies him. I speak to the lieutenant in private: “Do not depend on your guide. He is weak and terrified. Keep an eye on the weather. Note landmarks. Your first duty is to bring our visitor back safely.” He bows.

  I approach Joll again, trying to get an outline of his intentions.

  “Yes,” he says. “Of course I should not want to commit myself to a course beforehand. But, broadly speaking, we will locate the encampment of these nomads of yours and then proceed further as the situation dictates.”

  “I ask,” I continue, “only because if you get lost it becomes our task here to find you and bring you back to civilization.” We pause, savouring from our different positions the ironies of the word.

  “Yes, of course,” he says. “But that is unlikely. We are fortunate to have the excellent maps of the region provided by yourself.”

  “Those maps are based on little but hearsay, Colonel. I have patched them together from travellers’ accounts over a period of ten or twenty years. I have never set foot myself where you plan to go. I am simply warning you.”

  Since his second day here I have been too disturbed by his presence to be more than correct in my bearing towards him. I suppose that, like the roving headsman, he is used to being shunned. (Or is it only in the provinces that headsmen and torturers are still thought of as unclean?) Looking at him I wonder how he felt the very first time: did he, invited as an apprentice to twist the pincers or turn the screw or whatever it is they do, shudder even a little to know that at that instant he was trespassing into the forbidden? I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men. Does he wash his hands very carefully, perhaps, or change all his clothes; or has the Bureau created new men who can pass without disquiet between the unclean and the clean?

  Late into the night I hear the scraping and drumming of the orchestra under the old walnut trees across the square. There is a rosy glow in the air from the great bed of coals over which the soldiers are roasting whole sheep, a gift from the “Excellency”. They will drink into the early hours, then set off at daybreak.

  I find my way to the granary by the back alleys. The guard is not at his post, the door to the hut stands open. I am about to enter when I hear voices inside whispering and giggling.

  I stare into pitch dark. “Who is here?” I say.

  There is a scrabbling sound and the young sentry stumbles against me. “Sorry, sir,” he says. I smell his rum-sodden breath. “The prisoner called me and I was trying to help him.” From the darkness comes a snort of laughter.

  I sleep, wake to another round of dance-music from the square, fall asleep again, and dream of a body lying spread on its back, a wealth of pubic hair glistening liquid black and gold across the belly, up the loins, and down like an arrow into the furrow of the legs. When I stretch out a hand to brush the hair it begins to writhe. It is not hair but bees clustered densely atop one another: honey-drenched, sticky, they crawl out of the furrow and fan their wings.

  * *

  My last act of courtesy is to ride out with the Colonel as far as where the road turns north-west along the coast of the lake. The sun is up and glares so savagely from the surface that I have to shield my eyes. The men, tired and queasy after their night of revels, straggle behind us. In the middle of the column, supported by a guard who rides side by side with him, comes the prisoner. His face is ghastly, he sits his horse uncomfortably, his wounds plainly still cause him pain. In the rear come the pack-horses and carts with water-casks, provisions, and the heavier equipment: lances, fusils, ammunition, tents. All in all not a stirring sight: the column rides raggedly, some of the men bareheaded, some wearing the heavy plumed cavalry helmet, others the simple leather cap. They avert their eyes from the glare, all save one, who looks sternly ahead through a strip of smoked glass glued to a stick which he holds up before his eyes in imitation of his leader. How far will this absurd affectation spread?

  We ride in silence. The reapers, busy in the fields since before dawn, stop their work to wave as we pass. At the bend in the road I rein in and bid farewell. “I wish you a safe return, Colonel,” I say. Framed in the window of his carriage he inclines his head inscrutably.

  So I ride back, relieved of my burden and happy to be alone again in a world I know and understand. I climb the walls to watch the little column wind away along the north-west road towards the far green smudge where the river debouches into the lake and the line of vegetation vanishes into the haze of the desert. The sun still hangs bronze and heavy over the water. South of the lake stretch marshlands and salt flats, and beyond them a blue-grey line of barren hills. In the fields the farmers are loading the two huge old hay-wagons. A flight of mallard wheels overhead and glides down towards the water. Late summer, a time of peace and plenty. I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.

  Two miles due south of the town a cluster of dunes stands out from the flat sandy landscape. Catching frogs in the marshes and coasting down the slopes of the dunes on polished wooden sleds are the staple summer sports of the children, the one for the mornings, the other for the evenings when the sun goes down and the sand begins to cool. Though the wind blows at all seasons, the dunes are stable, being held together by a cap of thin grass and also, as I found by accident a few years ago, by timber skeletons. For the dunes cover the ruins of houses that date back to times long before the western provinces were annexed and the fort was built.

  One of my hobbies has been to excavate these ruins. If there are no repairs to be done to the irrigation works, I sentence petty offenders to a few days of digging in the dunes; soldiers are sent here on punishment details; and at the height of my enthusiasm I even used to pay for casual labour out of my own pocket. The work is unpopular, for the diggers must toil under a hot sun or in a biting wind with no shelter and with sand flying everywhere. They work half-heartedly, not sharing my interest (which they see as whimsical), discouraged by the speed at which the sand drifts back. But in the course of a few years I have succeeded in uncovering several of the largest structures to floor level. The most recently excavated stands out like a shipwreck in the desert, visible even from the town walls. From this structure, perhaps a public building or a temple, I have recovered the heavy poplar lintel, carved with a design of interlaced leaping fish, that now hangs over my fireplace. Buried below floor level in a bag that crumbled to nothing as soon as it was touched I also found a cache of wooden slips on which are painted characters in a script I have not seen the like of. We have found slips like these before, scattered like clothespegs in the ruins, but most so bleached by the action of sand that the writing has been illegible. The characters on the new slips are as clear as the day they were written. Now, in the hope of deciphering the script, I have set about collecting all the slips I can, and have let the children who play here know that if they find one it is always worth a penny.

  The timbers we uncover are dry and powdery. Many have been held together only by the surrounding sand and, once exposed, crumble. Others snap off at the lightest pressure. How old the wood is I do not know. The barbarians, who are pastoralists, nomads, tent-dwellers, make no reference in their legends to a permanent settlement near the lake. There are no human remains among the ruins. If there is a cemetery we have not found it. The houses contain no furniture. In a heap of ashes I have found fragments of sun-dried clay pottery and something brown which may once have been a leather shoe or cap but which fell to pieces before my eyes. I do not know where the wood came from to build these houses. Perhaps in bygone days criminals, slaves, soldiers trekked the twelve miles to the river, and cut down poplar trees, and sawed and planed them, and transported the timbers back to this barren place in carts, and built houses, and a
fort too, for all I know, and in the course of time died, so that their masters, their prefects and magistrates and captains, could climb the roofs and towers morning and evening to scan the world from horizon to horizon for signs of the barbarians. Perhaps in my digging I have only scratched the surface. Perhaps ten feet below the floor lie the ruins of another fort, razed by the barbarians, peopled with the bones of folk who thought they would find safety behind high walls. Perhaps when I stand on the floor of the courthouse, if that is what it is, I stand over the head of a magistrate like myself, another grey-haired servant of Empire who fell in the arena of his authority, face to face at last with the barbarian. How will I ever know? By burrowing like a rabbit? Will the characters on the slips one day tell me? There were two hundred and fifty-six slips in the bag. Is it by chance that the number is perfect? After I had first counted them and made this discovery I cleared the floor of my office and laid them out, first in one great square, then in sixteen smaller squares, then in other combinations, thinking that what I had hitherto taken to be characters in a syllabary might in fact be elements of a picture whose outline would leap at me if I struck on the right arrangement: a map of the land of the barbarians in olden times, or a representation of a lost pantheon. I have even found myself reading the slips in a mirror, or tracing one on top of another, or conflating half of one with half of another.

  One evening I lingered among the ruins after the children had run home to their suppers, into the violet of dusk and the first stars, the hour when, according to lore, ghosts awaken. I put my ear to the ground as the children had instructed me, to hear what they hear: thumps and groans under the earth, the deep irregular beating of drums. Against my cheek I felt the patter of sand driving from nowhere to nowhere across the wastes. The last light faded, the ramparts grew dim against the sky and dissolved into the darkness. For an hour I waited, wrapped in my cloak, with my back against the corner-post of a house in which people must once have talked and eaten and played music. I sat watching the moon rise, opening my senses to the night, waiting for a sign that what lay around me, what lay beneath my feet, was not only sand, the dust of bones, flakes of rust, shards, ash. The sign did not come. I felt no tremor of ghostly fear. My nest in the sand was warm. Before long I caught myself nodding.