Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 12, Issue 2 Read online

  Percy woke up with a pounding headache, and by lunchtime he was in a full-blown fever. Fyodorov was retching loudly next to the tent, to Deegan’s encouragement.

  When the doctor finally made his rounds, he instantly diagnosed malaria. Poor Lawrie had it worst of all, and he shook in his bedroll, pale skin drenched with sweat.

  ‘I guess we’re not going to Damascus,’ Deegan said. ‘You gotta be able to stand up to get shot at.’

  Percy sank into a funk. The way the war was going, he’d as good as missed his last chance at action. The malaria ravaged his body, so close to the typhoid he’d only just recovered from. Delirium took him for hours on end, and he emerged only to find his bones aching, his throat parched. The doctor returned with five grains of quinine, administered in sight of a vile sergeant who insisted Percy lift his tongue.

  ‘Swallow it down, private,’ the man bellowed. ‘Don’t you dare spit that out.’

  The drug was revolting, and it was all Percy could do to keep it down. The doctor had to pour a tonic into Lawrie through a funnel, and the boy choked and bucked like a landed fish. The medico and the sergeant shared a look that Percy caught—he’s going bad.

  The only bright spot in an otherwise awful week was when Deegan finally fell ill and was as miserable as everyone else. Percy was surrounded by groans and coughing, and spent half his time shivering despite the paint-curling Egyptian heat.

  Fyodorov and he took it in turns to wipe Lawrie with a wet cloth and trickle water into his mouth—the boy was burning up, and gasping for each breath. His skin was yellow now, and his belly distended.

  Suddenly, Lawrie shook violently, eyes rolling and teeth grinding. Percy stumbled out of the tent, waving and yelling incoherently. Everything was row upon row of blindingly white tents, only interrupted by the occasional wanderer like himself.

  ‘Doctor!’ he yelled, sobbing and coughing and finally kneeling in the dust, defeated.

  The stretcher bearers took Lawrie away, a leather strap between his teeth should he have another seizure. They were headed for the infirmary, but Percy saw the truth in their eyes. They might as well be carrying the poor boy straight to the morgue.

  Day and night, the same. Percy switched between shaking and boiling alive, his daily dose of quinine struggling to make any difference. The drug itself brought tinnitus, and the high-pitched noise nearly drove him insane.

  He slept and dreamt of sand, of a burnt world where everything was trying to leach the life out of him. There were statues with animal heads trying to teach him secrets, wizened husks in sarcophagi that reached for him, and something else hidden beneath the ancient landscape, something old when the Pharaohs were new.

  There was a horse bound to a chariot, and it looked on him mournfully, gave him a word in its own forgotten language. It was something to do with the act of bridling, the ancient compact between man and steed, and how it was time to call in a favour long owed.

  Percy woke to a scream, long and high, and knew no human could make that cry. There was a commotion outside, and he found he had the strength to stand. Following a handful of people down the dirt path between the row of tents, he drew up by the horse picket, staring in horror.

  It was Blucher, the other German settler from the boat. The man was wide-eyed and raving, a bloody bayonet in his hand. He’d killed three horses so far, and was struggling with the reins of a fourth.

  ‘You monster! You teufel!’ he shouted. ‘I won’t do it! I’ll kill all of these horses!’

  He bled the fourth horse heavily before another soldier disarmed him. The man screamed bloody murder, even as a squad of the Mounted Military Police disarmed him and dragged him away to the stockade.

  The next horse in the picket was Murdoch, and the patchy brute yanked at his rope, wild-eyed and screaming. The stallion had been moments away from the knife and he knew it. Even as others raced in to calm the animals, Percy stepped around the maddened animal, shying away as the animal tried to kick him.

  ‘Easy,’ he said, and Murdoch pulled at his rope, trying to take a bite out of him. His ears were back and his nostrils wide, staring hatred at the man.

  ‘Calm down,’ Percy said. ‘If you hurt the other horses, they’ll call you dangerous and put a bullet in you. The madman is gone.’

  ‘Is he?’ Murdoch answered, his lips moving, horse voice high and wavering. ‘But you’re standing right here.’

  Percy led Murdoch through the camp, rubbing at his eyes. Next to him the horse chattered constantly, pausing only to nip at other soldiers that they passed.

  ‘Who is to say what is real?’ the horse philosophised. ‘Perhaps all horses talk. Perhaps men should be struck dumb, and put in the yoke.’

  ‘What is this?’ Percy whimpered. ‘It’s the malaria. I’ve finally lost my mind.’

  ‘I consider your situation across the ages,’ Murdoch said. ‘We horses see in all times and all ways. In one age gone you’d be considered a saint, the next a madman, the last a prophet. In all you are a fool who serves me well.’

  Percy trembled. The horse was speaking quite clearly, but none of the people they passed seemed to notice this. He wanted someone, anyone to verify that this was real.

  ‘Did you ever wonder why some horses baulk at the jumps?’ Murdoch warbled, jerking at his halter. ‘We can see it in many ways, both as a cleared obstacle, or as something we clip with our hooves, even as the very thing we trip over and break our necks upon. All possibilities, all at once. It is all too much for some of us.’

  ‘Deegan,’ Percy rasped. ‘Fyodorov. Get up!’

  Deegan merely moaned and put a shirt across his face. Fyodorov found his feet, and staggered out of the tents, white-faced and shaking.

  ‘What is it?’ the Russian said.

  ‘It’s this horse,’ Percy said. ‘Go on Murdoch, say something.’

  Murdoch jerked at the rope, almost pulling it from Percy’s fingers. He lifted his head, feral-eyed as he whinnied and screeched for all he was worth.

  ‘You have lost your mind, Altschwager,’ Fyodorov said.

  ‘Murdoch can talk! Talk, you bloody nag,’ he snarled, only to find the horse snorting and pawing the ground. Muttering dire threats, Fyodorov returned to his bedroll, and Percy was left with a feral horse making a nonsense racket.

  As Percy led the horse on, the whinnies gave way to low laughter, a chuckle that made the hairs on his neck rise.

  ‘What was that?’ Percy said. ‘You made me look like a fool.’

  ‘None of your friends are suitable,’ Murdoch said. ‘No, it’s you I want, not some halfwit or a vodka-swilling brute. This way then,’ and he hauled on the rope. Percy trotted, trying to keep up. His head reeling, he saw his future as a madman, locked up in an asylum for the rest of his gibbering days. A talking horse! He felt hysteria bubble up from his gut, knew that at any moment he would crack up completely.

  Soon they stood at the edge of Lake Timsah. Man and horse had the whole place to themselves, and they might have been a pair of ancient figures but for the modern army at Percy’s back. Murdoch scraped at the gritty shore with one hoof.

  ‘If you make a line in something, you give it significance,’ the horse said, looking where the Suez Canal met the lake. ‘Man with his shovels and his picks, he has bisected two continents. Do not think that this went unnoticed.’

  The horse scuffed at the marks he made in the sand, a soft rumble sounding deep in his throat as he gathered his thoughts. Percy began to feel dizzy, a little faint. The sun was too bright.

  ‘Do you know what a fault line is, hmm?’ Murdoch whinnied. ‘Your Suez Canal is a fault line, a crack in the divine mould.’

  Percy sat down in the grit, head reeling against the bright sunlight on the lake water. He let Murdoch’s rope begin to trail through his fingers, and wondered if he was dying, if even now he lay in the infirmary next to young Lawrie, dreaming this madness up.

  ‘These lands will know strife forever more, but there is a greater peril,’ the ho
rse said. ‘The very fabric of creation has a loose thread here—one pluck and the whole world will unravel.’

  The horse scanned the lake, big nostrils drawing deeply. He caught the scent of something that made him whicker softly, and fear furrowed Murdoch’s face.

  ‘They come. I shall need your nimble fingers, Man,’ Murdoch said. ‘I cannot compel you, but it will go hard for your world if you do not render service.’

  The horse stepped out into the waters, and a shadow passed across Percy’s vision then, the sun seeming less than it was. The water was more silver than blue, and the horse looked like he was sinking into a mirror.

  ‘What is this?’ Percy said. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘You wanted a war!’ Murdoch said over his shoulder, words sliding into a mocking half-neigh. After a long moment, Percy stepped into the waters, plunging forward in the horse’s wake.

  It was a baptism, and it was a drowning. Murdoch led him deep into the grey waters, and even as Percy started to tread water, the horse lurched forward, lead rope yanking him down and into the brackish lake water.

  No matter how he tried, he could not release his grip on the rope. Fighting against the instinct to draw breath, Percy felt the horse diving, diving far deeper than the lake should have been. He saw that devil horse plunging forward, somewhere between galloping and swimming.

  Just as his vision swam with darkness, the water seemed less… wet. Pushing against a filmy barrier, Murdoch roared, a bubbling challenge that no throat should have been able to issue. Hooves pawed and scratched, and then something gave, a current seizing them and sweeping them through the gap.

  Everything around Percy lurched. The feeling of water was instantly gone, replaced by the dry chill of a catacomb. Gasping for breath, Percy opened his eyes to find he was now on horseback, moving at a canter.

  He was mounted on a quick little gelding, and at first glance it seemed to be Charlie, the riding horse he’d claimed as his own. Percy was garbed in his Light Horse uniform, complete with a rifle at his back and a bandolier of ammo across his shoulder.

  Reaching forward to stroke the horse’s mane, Percy stared with horror. The hair and fur were carved, and rough to the touch. His horse was made out of terracotta, flexible but far from alive. Around him were other horses like his, their hooves chopping at the dusty ground.

  Percy gave a horrified cry when he realised the riders around him were also clay men, but they were carved into the exact likenesses of Deegan, Lawrie and Fyodorov. These terracotta soldiers sat their horses rigidly, clay guns on their shoulders as they stared ahead with dead eyes.

  Murdoch led the strange group, the Maxim machine gun strapped to his back as it had been in the field exercises. He ran like a feral thing that had no business being in a horse’s shape, legs scrabbling and eager to tear ahead.

  The depths of Lake Timsah had become a grey landscape, an exaggeration of the waking world. The sun was a dim disc in a silver sky, giving little light to a land that was a bare reflection of the world Percy knew.

  ‘Where are we?’ Percy shouted.

  ‘It’s a mirror land, see, the grey place that hides behind glass,’ the horse replied in his sing-song way. ‘You’re only an inch or so from that stink, that meat world that you love so.’

  They moved across the rolling sands of the Sahara with league-eating steps, passing into the lands of Men in fits and mile-eating starts. The land squirmed, unable to decide if it was in the modern era or the glorious decadence of the past. Temples wavered and fell and regrew before his eyes, and the Great Pyramid of Cheops pulsed like a stone boil in need of lancing. The Nile reached for their horses like a watery snake, but Murdoch spoke a word that set it back into its banks. With one mighty leap they were over it and clear.

  ‘I am mad, I am mad,’ Percy blubbered. He felt faint, but in an instant his clay friends were riding closer, clay hands out and holding him to his saddle. They were perfect in every detail, even down to the perpetual drip in Lawrie’s nose, the laugh lines around Deegan’s eyes and mouth.

  As they pressed to the east, the land seemed less fixed, the ground beneath them less firm. With every step the grey sand sucked at the horses’ hooves. Everything made of stone was wilting here, rubbery or even liquefying. When they came to the reflection of the Suez Canal, it all made sense. The split in the continents was a fine crack in reality, a loose thread that was starting to work its way loose. It would be nothing for the surrounding lands to unravel, and fall into the absolute darkness of Nothing.

  ‘They will come soon,’ Murdoch said. ‘Quickly Man, make your gun ready.’

  Close by the loose end of the ‘thread’, Percy and the clay soldiers set up the Maxim gun, which itself was halfway between steel and clay. The images of Deegan and Fyodorov even moved like their living counterparts, heads bobbing about as if silently joking with each other as they went about their business. Clay Lawrie carted over the boxes of ammunition, and when Percy took it from him he felt the whole box humming, as if it contained a beehive.

  The clay boy helped him to open the box, and for a moment Percy flinched until he saw that it contained the usual belt of bullets. The cartridges looked how they were meant to, but they had the same dusty sheen as the gun, existing somewhere between clay and metal. Underneath the reflected sun, the bullets whispered and shivered, eager to take their first and only flight.

  ‘These are all marked,’ Percy said, tracing a picture etched into one of the bullets. They were hieroglyphs, a series of picture words running through the entire belt of ammunition.

  ‘Hmm,’ Murdoch snorted. ‘That one is the Book of the Dead. That other box humming in Tibetan there contains most of the Bardo Thodol in it. Sometimes the pretty words help things to die when they disagree with a bullet.’

  The terracotta soldiers had the gun mounted and loaded with the shaking bullets. Percy rushed forward with the water cans for the coolant line, only to find the canisters were all full of honey.

  ‘It will work, don’t worry,’ Murdoch snorted. ‘Be quick, someone approaches.’

  The clay men stepped away from the Maxim gun, and the significance was clear. As the living human of this motley group, only Percy had the right to fire the weapon here. Putting his hands around the firing handles, he felt the machine gun stir in his hands, like an excited dog hauling against a leash.

  He scanned the rippling landscape through the sights, wary of the contours that rippled and rolled like slow waves. A clever enemy could use this as cover. Percy focussed on the workings of the machine gun, pushing the voice of denial to a distant corner of his mind.

  None of this is real, that voice insisted, but Percy examined the elevation settings of the gun, saving his mental breakdown for the future. The numbers were stamped into the metal, but alongside these were an additional set of figures, more pictographs. Adjusting the dial to keep the sights level with the horizon, he froze.

  There in the gun’s sights was a man on a horse, galloping for them at full speed. It was a British officer, waving his white pocket handkerchief.

  ‘Hold your fire, men!’ the man shouted. ‘Friendlies coming through.’

  He looked to his fire crew for reassurance, but all he saw were their blank clay stares, the calm way that clay Deegan stroked his moustache, the false cigarettes that Lawrie and Fyodorov pretended to smoke. They were not men, not anything apart from constructs built to service the gun. It was his decision alone.

  ‘Do not trust it,’ Murdoch said, teeth bared.

  Like most Australians, Percy had a healthy disrespect for the officer class. But the sloppy or absent salutes were a world apart from firing upon a lieutenant. He hesitated, then drew his hands out of the firing handles.

  ‘No,’ Murdoch whinnied. ‘Do not trust your eyes in this place!’

  Percy looked to Lawrie, who stubbed out his ‘cigarette’ and knelt in front of the range-finder. The clay boy raised four fingers, and so Percy set the sights for 400 yards.

  Ig
noring the bluster of the mad horse, Percy cranked the elevation screw, raising the gun. The undulating landscape made things tricky, but Percy checked the sights, breathing in time with the pulse of the unstable ground. Slipping his hands back into the firing handles, Percy pressed the trigger bar with his thumbs.

  The Maxim coughed, a quick stutter of bullets that stitched the landscape just in front of the horse’s feet. Reining his horse in, the British officer stood in his saddle, shaking the white cloth with emphasis.

  ‘I’ll have your hide, private!’ the man shouted. ‘What bloody game are you playing at?’

  ‘Come no closer, Sir.’ Percy called back. ‘I’ve my orders.’

  ‘You men are absent without leave,’ the officer said. ‘In light of your—sickness—I will overlook this gross insubordination. But you must dismantle this gun at once, and report back to the infirmary.’

  Percy froze. What if he was in a fever dream, hallucinating the whole episode? Malaria or no, if he murdered an officer on the target range, he’d be in front of a firing squad within a week.

  ‘Well?’ the officer shouted. ‘I am waiting.’

  Percy pointed to the clay Fyodorov, who was acting as spotter. He took the field-glass from him, and slid the tubes until the British officer came into focus. The lieutenant appeared to be flesh and blood, and his face was in a fury.

  ‘Please,’ Murdoch said, and then Percy saw it, the sly way the officer was looking at the loose thread they were guarding. The man’s horse was just another beast made of clay, legs stretching as it crept closer towards them.

  ‘That is no man,’ Percy said, and opened fire. The officer spurred his horse into a full gallop, and the creature suddenly sprouted extra legs, limbs pinwheeling as it darted across the rolling swell of land. The man in the saddle melted into the spider-thing, the idea of the crisp uniform falling away as it dropped the disguise.

  The Maxim chattered, levers clicking, shells scattering left and right. Deegan fed the ammunition belt into the gun, guiding the magic bullets with care.