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.
“You said you weren’t coming.”
“Why didn’t you answer? It was just drinks in the end, no dinner. But you weren’t even here!”
“I was.” He pointed over his shoulder vaguely.
Her eyes rolled but she was smiling. “You didn’t check your phone.”
“I left my phone at my apartment last night. You remember this?”
“Oh!” she said, angry with herself, or him, he couldn’t tell.
She hugged him. “Can’t you just be glad I’m here?” She put her cheek flat against his chest. “And how much have you had, my love? I can smell it through your shirt.”
“Some.” He grinned to no one, without choice or pleasure.
“Did you write today?”
“Yeah. Just before I came.”
“The Dutch stuff?”
He nodded. By her face, he couldn’t tell if she believed he’d done anything but drink. Anyway, if she didn’t, she would never say so, even if nothing could help him more than to be called out. That would mean tension. Nothing was worth that.
Larent set his bow down against the amplifier and started in on a delicate pizzicato line, his right hand snaking over the fingerboard as his left pinched the strings. For a moment it took Stagg away from her, put him in mind of Bartók’s strings. It was a mutual respite.
He and Renna sat at the table. “Another sherry?” he asked without raising his eyes from the empty copita in front of her.
“Sure, yes,” she said.
He lifted his hand in the light of the hanging brass lamp, signaling for the waitress. “And the writer, how was he?” he asked.
“He was good.”
Stagg waited for more but she was absorbed with Larent’s hands now. “Very nice.” He felt his mouth tightening into a smile but conquered the urge.
The waitress, dressed crisply in black, crossed into the yellow cone of light.
“Another sherry for her,” he said, leaning close to her ear. “And I’ll have, what, an Ardbeg? If that’s something you’ve got.” She gave a sharp nod, all surface, and withdrew.
The room clouded over in the harmonics Larent drew from his bass. The music’s complexion had changed. It seemed beyond comparison now. Perhaps that only underlined Stagg’s ignorance.
As the piece wound down in intricate double-stopped glissandi, he took in Larent’s face: the long jaw, the very short, very brown hair, the eyes of the same color, and the delicately freighted expression — with what exactly Stagg couldn’t tell — on which applause, twice now, had no effect.
Renna and Larent had been great friends in prep school, then something more afterward, though at a distance. He was in a conservatory in New Hampshire, and she was in grad school abroad.
Now they were something less, though exactly what Stagg felt it hard to know, given how little she volunteered. The two kept up, that much was clear. There were his performances and her readings and panels. Renna’s silence about Larent annoyed Stagg, but prying was just the sort of indignity he wouldn’t bear. Perhaps she thought she was saving him from more mulling. Of course it could only have the opposite effect.
Larent’s manner was a challenge. The literary set might be nauseating, yes, but it was possible to feel that way only because reading them—“marking the axes of their being,” another phrase he’d run into that Renna had seized on — was not very difficult. It was a nausea born mostly of boredom.
Larent was different, opaque, and even that without making a show of it. Translucent. It wasn’t just that he was a musician, although that wasn’t irrelevant. Notes could give away less than words. It was that he didn’t flaunt who or what he knew, or what he was or thought he was, or what he thought you ought to think he was. Maybe he didn’t have strong ideas about any of this, though there was plenty to have ideas about. He was interesting. That was just a fact about him, like height or weight. Partly this was because he seemed less interested in himself than in whatever he found himself doing. If only Stagg’s own engagement with his work might be so natural.
There was none of the theater, then, the performance of character, that could give away the shape of your soul — a shape, incidentally, almost always distinct from the one you were trying to project.
In one sense you could say he was without charm, but in a way that had an abiding pull on Renna, it seemed, and, grudgingly, on Stagg too. It’s what set him apart from the people in her world. Charm, after all, was always a bit of a racket. And he wasn’t a racket, though he wasn’t exactly earnest in the ordinary sense of the word. He didn’t appear earnest, not consistently. But that might be what it was to be earnest, in the same way that the truest gentlemen have no truck with etiquette. Only imposters do. Gentility was in the bones — there was nothing to be done about it — and not being regulated by a concern for appearances, it could surface in ways that looked distinctly ungentlemanly to those who didn’t know better. It wasn’t merely sprezzatura either. There was nothing studied about it. It was the thing itself. Larent’s artlessness might be of the same order.
There was silence. Larent leaned the bass against the speaker cabinet and joined the table of musicians. Five minutes later he saw them off.
“So?” he said, looking at Stagg and tapping Renna’s shoulder. He was brighter now.
“That was weird!” she said.
“This is your group?” Stagg asked.
“No, no, just people I know from school,” Larent said. “Sick of their orchestra gigs, for the night, anyway. It’s the only time I can get them to play my stuff.”
“They don’t like what you write?”
“Well, they like me. The music, well, they’d play it either way. Do you like it?”
“I think I do.”
“Interesting,” he said. “It’s not Bach, though — any of the Bachs — is it?” he said to Renna, the tiniest smile cresting on his lips. “Or Brahms.”
“No, I liked it!”
“The distorted parts too?”
“Yes… but the last thing was more me.”
“I know,” Larent said. He turned to Stagg. “I think the straighter pieces reassure them I haven’t lost my mind. But actually I want to send that one through the effects board — infinite delays, chorusing, pink noise — just to see. Make it unbelievably loud too.”
“You’d see them in pain,” Stagg said, gesturing at the tables around them.
“Well, as long as they clap.”
“Why shouldn’t they.”
Larent shifted in his chair. He set his hands on the edge of the table, his long fingers arched as if at a keyboard. “So what, drinks?” He caught the waitress’s eye and ordered the house red.
Stagg woke Renna’s phone, which lay on the table, and checked the time. In truth it was a pantomime. He already knew he had to go. He lifted the tumbler to his lips and claimed the last briny drops. “I should go,” he said as he put the glass down.
“Work,” Renna said without looking at him.
“Sure,” he said.
Larent seemed puzzled but before he could say anything Stagg got to his feet and bent over the table toward him. “I’ve thought about it. I did like it. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Larent said, almost to himself.
Stagg took Renna’s arm brusquely in his hand. “So I’ll see you around, I’m sure.” She gave him a look of exasperation, real or faux, and was about to speak, but before she got anything out, he was away from the table and through the smudged glass doors into the bracing night.