Square Wave (4 page)

Hendrik’s service as an army officer had been mostly symbolic. In any case he had little need for a weapon of a foot soldier. The training he had was proper to his class: in longbows and rapiers, and in horsemanship, not guns. But he was far from alone among officers in having fine versions of infantry armaments made up, not for use, nor even for show, but simply for possession. The felt need for them seemed to grow just as that weaponry eclipsed the rarefied martial skills of the nobility on seventeenth-century battlefields.

The Velte collection was extensive. It held, among much else, ancient hand-cannon, elegantly wrought pikes, and an array of arquebuses of various bores. Some had been lost, dispersed, or sold over the years, but the arquebus in Haas’s hands was the best of Hendrik’s: uncommonly accurate owing to the rifling, and potent, with a bore twice the size of the newer infantry muskets.

The gun had never been fired on a man before it came to Haas, who was the first in several generations to serve actually rather than symbolically. His mother had been reluctant to see him do so on the other side of the Earth, if he had to do it at all, and then only in defense of crass commercial interests. But that was the modern world. The son had wanted a part in winning it; that is, in winning whatever there was left to be won, even if his kind were no longer in the ascendancy. So he’d left Europe to extend the reach of something between a business and a colony, the Dutch East India Company.

Almost from the start there was local resistance. It turned armed and absolute as soon as it became clear they were occupiers not liberators. (The Portuguese had already given the game away; simple trade could never be the end of it.) Haas found himself helping raze Colombo, when the Portuguese still had a hold on it, then rebuilding the same city after the Dutch won it.

Since then he’d been making ever-deeper incursions into the bush, toward Kandy, winning and losing the same ground several times. At one point he took a nine-month trip back to Europe, as a sort of extended constitutional. It included a marriage, to a second cousin of equal birth, or slightly better, as the last century or so had been kinder to her family’s fortunes than his own. But the woman, the girl, was far from his mind, now that he’d returned to Lanka. Love would matter one day, he thought. It would be everything. But first there was blood, and there was plenty of it to be spilled.

After several recent losses of position and personnel, they’d managed, almost magically, to hold the ground they took. He thought he must have solved something, even if he couldn’t say what. It must be showing up in his tactics, moment to moment, a finer calibration to the environment, one he couldn’t describe or know of except through the raw fact of their success. Lately he’d heard rumors that the Portuguese were making trouble to the north, perhaps drawing the Sinhalese away from the southern front of the kingdom.
They
might be his magic. He put it out of his mind. It didn’t help. And they were only rumors.

Haas and his squad found themselves on Kandy’s doorstep now. Fifty miles, maybe less. But their victories, coming consecutively, were beginning to cripple them. The men, and he especially, as commander, had been left starved of sleep and, far from Colombo, short of munitions.

By rights Haas could have led from a distance. He was fourth in command of Dutch forces on the island. His rise hadn’t been hurt by his family name, the distant echo of clout it carried. But mostly it was down to his relentlessness in the bush these past years.

Probably he should have been relieved at this point. Leading a charge took the kind of clarity it was very hard to conjure in a state of exhaustion. But when the kingdom finally fell in Kandy, he thought, when the natives would submit or be annihilated, he wanted to be there, not Colombo. After the years he’d given, he couldn’t imagine it otherwise, not taking his men to the center.

Haas tested the trigger’s pull. An even pressure sent the serpentine dipping back toward the pan, the smoldering match in its jaws. He took a small blackened cloth from his coat and wiped down the flash pan and the touchhole. From the horn he drizzled powder until there was a cone of it in the pan. He flattened the charge with his thumb and the powder stretched to the edges.

He raised his eye to the sight but there again was only the broad barricade of the village. For hours now he and his men had watched little but the sun rise. It might have been a religious observance that kept the Sinhalese so still and silent. Or else they were just waiting for him.

His arms were burning from this same stillness, holding up the arquebus in the fork of the tree. Finally, there was movement: fifty yards above, high on the rock face, an eagle with chestnut feathers and a face mostly of black rose from its nest. Without a thought he swiveled the gun’s barrel in the fork and set the sight just below the neck of the bird. His arms and his senses revived. The bird stared down from the mountain with unfazed eyes. The men turned to Haas and his peculiar engagement. Their bleary leader only returned the look. They busied themselves with their muskets.

The eagle shot from the cliff, its wings tucked tight to its body, down to an ancient tree whose branches hung above the path. Near the base of a giant limb, the wings flared, the claws extended, and a twisting wire, iridescent green, took flight.

The weight of the snake slowed the bird. Haas nearly took a midair strike at it, but just then it swept up the mountain face to its nest. A scrum broke out. He pivoted the barrel in the fork toward the animals, the bloody snake lashing out at the bird lunging at it with a cleaver of a beak.

Now he bore down on the trigger with stiff fingers. The serpentine struck at the pan in one blinding motion. An ochre flare, the crack of a fifty-yard whip, and a thrashing snake and bird. There were two or three flaps just above the nest before the bird dove into the gray-green underbrush. Caught in its claws in the escape, the snake was thrown from the nest, weltering along the smooth gray face in increasingly vigorous twirls and spins. Finally it arrived at the base of the great tree, directly below the nest from which it had been snatched. It was dewy and raw and still.

The men stared at it. The chance at ambush was dead, for no reason they could discern. Haas slipped the gun out from the fork in the tree and stood it on the ground. The barrel warmed his hands. It was no clearer to him, really, exactly why he’d fired, except perhaps that the threat of silence, the fatigue it brought, now exceeded that of open combat.

As he reached for the ramrod to reload, two Sinhalese in long cloaks appeared on the path above, beyond the snake and tree—with muskets raised. Dutch muskets. Spoils.

Haas’s men scrambled to take aim. He himself knelt behind the rocks that made up the front wall of their outpost, bemused by the contempt and cruelty that suddenly filled him. He heard the thick, resonant pop of four rounds discharged at once, not far off from the sound of cannon-shot, but more complex, chordal. His men played no role in it.

Petr, the gangly metalworker-cum-soldier Haas had sailed here with years ago, seemed to hurl his gun against the rock front. It clattered about and fell at the base of the short cannon. He went to his knees and into the pile of round ball, scattering it across the wood beams undergirding the fort. With his good hand he clutched the wet red one with too few fingers pointing in too many directions. The other four Dutchmen returned fire, but blindly, discharging their muskets with stocks held at their waists. The volley came to nothing.

A fine buckshot, almost a mist, came in then, from the barrels of a different sort of musket—Portuguese ones, judging by their angular stocks. They’d been fired by two Sinhalese who’d crawled partway out of hatches in the barricades.

The buckshot washed over one of the Dutchmen. It was too fine, and fired from too great a distance, to kill outright. Instead it scoured his face down to an oily translucence. Swatches of bone shone brightly where the skin had been ground away, around the chin and cheeks. His nose had become a small fibrous nub overhanging raw lips and cracked teeth. From his eyes came a feeble glare that fixed on Haas. The man seemed to choke. Petr caught him with his good hand as the man’s knees buckled, but he could bring him no comfort, and the two lay among the pile of round ball.

In the dark before dawn, Haas’s men had already primed the cannon. The vent brimmed with the coarse powder, and a thin flax fuse dangled from it, just a few yards from where Haas still knelt. He laid the arquebus down beside him in the soil heavy with water and began to unthread the slow match, still burning from both ends, from the serpentine. The other two men in fighting shape had laid their shortswords down next to them as they reloaded their muskets. Haas held one end of the match to the soil and it sizzled to a silence. He twisted it around his thumb and held the lit end between his fingers.

The Sinhalese were quiet now. More were surely positioning themselves, and his own squad was in shambles. Once again they would have to give ground to the heathens. If not, there would soon be none left alive to hold it.

Haas made a hammer stroke in the air to Petr, who pulled a sliver of steel from his boot in response. He tossed it across the other soldiers to Haas, who raised his hand and held it a moment. The two soldiers reloading their guns laid down their ramrods and weapons. One moved to help the two fallen men to their feet.

Arquebus in hand and the other soldier in tow, Haas crawled toward the cannon. The barrel began to fill with the thick black mud all around as the butt carved a trailing wedge in it. The match’s tip poked up from his hand, safe from the water in the soil. The men got to their knees and with two sharp, coordinated tugs, Haas from the middle and the soldier from the tip, raised the cannon twenty degrees so that it faced directly onto the barricades. Haas took one more look at the target, which could barely be seen through the shrubs surrounding the cannon. Two musket barrels peeked out of the hatches, and behind them he thought he could make out their shadowed faces, the black, animal eyes he was going to blind.

He turned to his men behind him, at the fort. The others propped up the half-faced one. Haas was disgusted not by his injuries, which were catastrophic, but by his uselessness. He couldn’t imagine him surviving the week. Minutes ago he looked a spectral white and pink; now there was only a crimson visage. At the equator, the fetid was the state toward which everything raced. It was the center. The infection that would finish him had probably already taken root in that mass of pulped flesh. The sooner the better.

In one motion Haas turned and touched the match to the fuse. There was a hissing, then a rumble. The cannon convulsed, seemed to deform under pressure. The ball came out low. It ricocheted off the dirt and punctured the wooden barricades, leaving them convex and gaping just above the hatches. One of the Sinhalese was in slivers. The other seemed to have been halved by the collapsing wall. The fluttering of his arms slowed, the rhythmic heaving of his chest petered out, leaving only the top of a man, still as stone, clutching a gun.

Haas dropped the spike in the vent. He lifted the butt of the gun high in the air and smashed it with it. The spike twisted and dug into the barrel base. He struck it again, pushing it further into the hole. He struck it once more and a long split ran up the stock. The spike was nearly flush with the vent now, its mass having been molded by the strikes to the dimensions of the hole. The cannon was crippled. If they had to accept defeat, they might at least leave no spoils behind.

For an instant, looking at the ruined stock of the ancestral weapon, he thought to bring it down on his own man, drive his nose like a spike. In the next, he thought to dump the gun. But in the one after, he came away with it—perhaps it could be fixed—down the mountain with his men, the broken ones too, to ground that was still solidly theirs.

3

The low-e rumble of bowed double basses filled the space. Sustained Es in higher registers, from a pair of cellos and a viola, joined those nearly subsonic tones, a timbral complication to the accord of pitch. Of the basses, Edward Larent’s was distinct. It was miked. The signal ran through an overdriven amplifier coupled to a nondescript speaker cabinet belonging to the little Halsley café. As the sextet held the E, Larent leaned into one of several pedals at his feet, loosing a pitched growl, still an E. It enveloped the few dozen guests. He drew the volume down with another pedal, level with the other instrumentalists, though the tone was still thick with distortion.

A seven-note figure in a minor key cascaded from his bass. The rest—first the viola, then the cellos, and finally the other double basses—adopted ascending figures of the same length, interlocking with Larent’s, and a guttural counterpoint replaced the droning Es.

Stagg sat at one of the tiny metal tables at the edge of the darkened café, consumed. The sextet navigated a series of variations, Larent’s bass growing rawer, more ragged, from one to the next. The phrases crowded Stagg’s thoughts, reoriented them, brought them the veneer of structure before collapsing them down to a measureless point.

The music quieted for a moment, but given the circumstances, her voice could only be remote.

“I never said I wanted to meet them,” she said. “As if I’d have anything to say.”

He looked hard into the dark and made out Renna’s face in the fringes of lamplight at a table three from his. Her chair was pulled back from it, and her words were for a figure, a woman, he thought, by the silhouette of hair, standing even further from the penumbra.

The music stopped. A wave of applause rose and fell as the players cleared the stage, all but Larent. The cellists came down the three or four steps on the left of the stage and sat at a table near Renna, nodding at her as they sat. The contrabassists joined them while the violist, a squat man in a woolly blue sweater, headed toward the door, lighter and cigarette in hand.

“You’ve been here,” Stagg said, standing above her now

“Yes and where were you!” She got up and kissed him, grabbed his hands, wrapped up his fingers and squeezed. He brought his hands together, hers in them, and extended his forearms to keep her where she was. The nausea, the buzzing head, the discarded afternoon, all for naught. At least he’d salvaged what he could, writing through the hangover, after he’d woken as night was falling.