A History Maker. Alasdair Gray
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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