The wet logs crackled and spat on the hearth. The candles, which were many, made haloes about themselves, but what they did not illuminate they rendered black. The room was naturally dark with its teak panels and grove of mahogany furniture and fittings of other unfamiliar kinds of wood. The carvings mimicked exotic fruits and ferns. The jungle had been domesticated here. Brass ornament glinted.

Captain Garnet found the atmosphere in the room heavy, too close. The air was not the easily breathable medium that it should have been in those climes. He felt as if he were in the lair of an animal. He sprung the lid of his hunter and noted the hour. A number of documents lay on the table before him, their broken seals like scabs of clotted blood.

Colonel Mountjoy sipped his brandy. Slender chains of bright soft metal shone in the firelight as he languidly lifted the glass to his lips; they dripped and glistened from the cuffs of his red uniform coat like silver streams of water. An unmilitary gold thread also dangled, from the braid.

- Some of the most undeniable things are really very improbable, Captain. Think of what lies a hundred yards from the garrison wall; a forest all but unaltered since the beginning of time. But you have walked in England along a Roman road.

Captain Garnet was reading and did not reply. The three other men in the room could not help but be frightened, a little, by the Captain’s insubordination. They all shifted the weight on their feet. There was a sense in which these men were ordinary dragoons, but they wore no insignia and the motif on each of their many buttons was like none worn by any other soldier in all of that vast army posted everywhere around the earth.

There was a chipped mug on the table at which the Captain sat and in it a single flower which flickered like a dry flame in the candlelight.

- Your men, Colonel, he said, what do you suppose they are doing at this moment?

- Telling stories, without a doubt. To the new recruits, the fresh blood.

He put his empty glass down on the shelf above the fire, watched by the three soldiers.

- Filthy stories most likely. McAllister will get them all to tell of the first time they ever saw a naked woman, the bragging Jacks.

The Colonel’s setter raised his head in his basket for a moment before laying his chin back carefully on his paws. All of the men inevitably thought of what they would have said to McAllister.

- What I remember most about her was that she had very very pale skin. Red hair and glossy lips like a bloody wound. The loveliest of girls. Free. Of an artistic temperament. I think her name began with a Z. Green eyes. You know the sort of thing I mean.

Of course, some of this is speculation. But I believe I know what must have happened. It was very late. She had gone to her room alone. Lights the lamp. She struggles to close and lock the window with its heavy iron hasp. The air, as always, has become suddenly cold in that hot country, nipping, as though someone had opened a door in a hot room and let the cool night flood in. The iron is so cold as almost to burn her long white fingers, a freezing burn. She might have read for a while. She undresses, strips to that skin. No jewel but her ruby drops, like strawberries. Ivory, pearl, ashes. Her red hair. She has closed the shutters on the big silver hunter’s moon. It is only now that she notices the pulse of dark life already in that room.

She thinks it is a moth, or a moth-like creature, but of an uncommon size. It is a large and glamorous insect, its furry black forewings almost always cloaking a lining like a cloth of gold satin. An insect dressed for the opera. Gently lustrous. She felt a thrill, looking at it, partly that primeval fear for what is potentially deadly in nature and partly desire, the need to possess, experienced as a physical tingling. She was determined to capture this beast and to release it, back into the night from which it had undoubtedly invaded her chamber. Certainly, she could not sleep with that in her room.

So, she begins to stalk it, creeping towards its resting form with a mocking stealth only to have it fly to a dark and inaccessible corner the second before she pounced, as though her every intention were transparent to it. She begins to dance about the room after it. Even daring to strike at in exasperation as it flies over her shoulder, brushing her cheek with the breath of its wing, more afraid of hurting it than of missing it again. Imagine what it might have been to see that vixen caper in the lamplight. She danced until she grew heated and glowed. She was as though teased by vines and tendrils of luxurious gossamer, the most gentle attentions of an invisible lover. She was fascinated and, timidly, alluring. She kicked at her muslin and lace. She followed the creature’s flight by its scent in the blackness, something rich and dank; cinnamon, vanilla and rot. And she caught it. How else could this end? Her hands closed upon it and she had it before her. Was it a moth? Or a spider? Or an owl; a small spicy bird whose feathers sting like paprika? A humming came from her prisoner, a discordant, trembling strain. She had that coal of life, that vibrant and vibrating creature in the cage of her thin soft fingers. It was like her own coppery gold centre. She held her inside outside of herself, in her hands. She peeps through the bars of this cage and is congratulated with an iridescent wink.

Now you can all see what she should have done; she should have opened that heavy iron window before she began this chase. It is now too late and to release that nervous being rasping at her palms after all she had done to capture it, was unthinkable.

She was a bold one that jade and she was fortunate that the handle of her bedroom door was of a style that allowed her to press upon it with her elbows, even catch at it with a knee, on which a dull bruise flowers, and ease it open just a crack until she could flick it wide with her toes. The thing in her hand was so precious and yet also perhaps the object of what might be termed disgust, and the idea that she would accidentally crush its brittle body in her exertions was appalling to her. She needed to find an open window. Could that be so hard?

McAllister had just stepped back into the house through the kitchen door and thrown the bolt. An honest northern soldier, a youngster, desperate for a breath of air in a world where there seemed to be none. Remember the glossy lips and the sceptical smile. Imagine what she looked like as she strode towards him naked, into the light of his candle, her hands held clasped before her as though tied, a willing captive. The darkness fell away from her as if she had been clothed by it, like folds of falling wax. A lithe and luminous bone. Her copper, her crimson, her emerald eyes. She blushed. Scarlet. But her face showed no other sign of the least embarrassment. He greets her with a young man’s best attempt at the roué’s imperious grin. She indicates the closed door with the merest inclination of her head and he understands. He puts down his glass with its last few ruddy drops in a little puddle of spilled claret. He slips the bolt and she steps briefly into the night and lets that spirit of velvet and silk into the cool air, still thick with a memory of sultriness.

Now she turns to the soldier. She reaches up for his bonny head and pulls it down towards her as she stands tip-toed, knotting her hands once more, this time around the pitted angry texture of his neck. She turns down his stiff red collar and fiercely bites into his beloved throat. Sucking hungrily at the throb of his quick deep pulse.

- To think, that wench will be an old woman now.

- Not so. She’s dead. Picked up some wog disease back East. Chittagong.

- I had a batman once, continued Mountjoy, who reckoned he could make a brandy out of strawberries, wild strawberries. I let him try. Turned out to be the filthiest stuff. Didn’t taste of strawberries, although it had the colour of them. Powerful. I was going to tell him to pack it in but then he got sabred in the head. Sevastopol I think. Or somewhere on the Black Sea.

The Colonel reached for the cob-webbed bottle yet again and re-filled his tumbler. It was awkward for him with his chained hands, but none of the soldiers offered to help him, nor did he seem to expect it. He sensed Garnet’s disapproval and surprise.

- I like the taste, he said. And the warming sensation. It feels like forgiveness.

He sipped. He stared for a moment at his sleeping dog.

- You will be wondering, Captain, why an officer of my distinction should be content to head the garrison in this remote and unimportant outpost.

- I should be surprised if you were content, Colonel. And, of course, this outpost ceased to be unimportant when you murdered your unfortunate prisoner. Indeed, his Majesty’s grip on the whole province has been materially loosened by your extraordinary action. Not the first in your distinguished career.

- For goodness’ sake, Garnet, don’t talk to me like you were Westminster Abbey. We both know too much for that old cock.

Garnet knew he had spoken out of turn, gone a step too far. Mountjoy would know now that Garnet intended to kill him here, rather than take him back to Montreal. For all of his sang froid, Garnet could see that the Colonel was afraid.

- I’ve always had setters. I don’t know how many. Lovely dogs. Called them all Seymour. I had one captured by the Turks once and they sent me his ears. Scalped him. Of course they are all dead now, one way or another. I wonder what will happen to this fellow.

Mountjoy might have been asking Garnet for a favour, but the Captain ignored him. He looked coolly through the papers on his desk.

His men had thought that the prisoner’s cell was nothing more than a slippery floor at first. Then they had seen the guts all laid out. That phrase was a quotation from the report. And one leg below the knee was still missing. Montreal had wanted to speak to that prisoner, a brave of some eminence over half of the continent, and he had disappeared in this garrison, under Mountjoy’s care, apparently the victim of some devastating fury. Montreal had told Garnet that this was the end for Mountjoy. Garnet knew what he was dealing with. He had made his careful preparations.

- The red race has come to the end of its time, you know that, Garnet? They are hunters not farmers, and hunters take up too much room. Men such as you and I should know that above all else.

The Colonel kicked at the fire and sent sparks like flares into the broad chimney.

- Leave the fire, if you please, Colonel.

- They caught your fellow near the barrow. A sinister place. Brave man, of course, like all of them pretty much. He bit one of my chaps. They have a touch of the cannibal about them, we think. The men don’t rate them much, as you have gathered.

Garnet looked at the Colonel’s splendid blond moustaches and imagined them dripping with gore. Or his head on fire.

- There are no excuses, Colonel. There were orders, leaving aside the humanity of it. This country will always be Indian country, a strong-box to us and that man was a key, perhaps. And you have thrown it down a well.

- Do you remember when you first came here? You dreamed your room was overrun with rats. You told me a dream rat had run over your chest.

- I think the regiment will look after your dog.

Mountjoy refused to be grateful.

- That man’s tongue was a grey obscene thing. Like a fleshy fungus.

- Colonel Mountjoy, I know very well you are capable of influencing the temperature in this room. I do wish you would stop it.

There was no more talk for a while. Only Garnet was absolutely sure what they were waiting for. The Colonel began to pick at the chillies and peppers on his plate. Eating with his fingers.

- I won’t offer you these, you wouldn’t care for them. Proper Indian. Painfully hot, actually, he chuckled. He took another mouthful of brandy.

- There are doctors, engineers, even a priest among these men, Garnet. I think imprisonment has something to do with it. That’s my theory. Capturing and being captured. Besieging and being besieged. It undoes what we have known. You can’t tell whether you are in a fortress or a trap, surrounded by your comrades or your deadliest enemies.

- How have you survived, Colonel, for so long? Being what you are.

The Colonel was not drunk, perhaps could not be made drunk, not by brandy at any rate, nor was he naturally garrulous, but for some reason of his own he was in a mood to talk. He may have thought that Garnet had deserved answers to his questions and he was a soldier, long used to handing out to men the things they deserved.

- There have been ways, always some way. The surgeon was a friend of mine, knew my needs and his own interests. It was sometimes necessary to bleed one of the men. And I have a sort of hibernating power, like a wolf’s, akin to a great capacity for enduring boredom.

- Your men have been notoriously ill-disciplined and lackadaisical but with a frightening reputation for ferocity in battle.

- We have served our country in that way. The Colonel nodded. Served our country and ourselves.

- The men too then?

- Some of them, as you may have cause to know.

Garnet did not look at his own men. He knew they were blinking into the fire.

- But if it is a disease, as some say, then not all diseases are fatal or chronic. Think of those shipwrecked sailors driven by direst need to cannibalism, dead bodies, most likely, so they would say. They survive, they come out of the service. They open a little grog shop in Clerkenwell. They are never tempted to take a piece out of a customer, to take a chop off him. Some conditions simply wear off.

Garnet felt he was being persuaded and would not show himself interested. He was a sombre man and a display of indifference came easily to him. 

- What else do your men talk of, apart from naked wenches?

- Pain. They will ask the new men, ‘What is the worst pain you have ever felt?’ I know this, as sure as though I had ordered them to do it.

- I expect a stab’s a hard knock, said one of the new men, just a boy with pink ears next to these hairy grey faces, hoping to flatter. Or a bullet.

- I got up in the night last night, said Weyland, to pay a visit and I kicked the claw foot of that old chest on my way with the smallest of my toes. McAllister made a face in sympathy. Then on the way back, I did it again, same toe, different bit of furniture. McAllister laughed.

- You lost the nail I expect.

- That’s long gone. I’m always doing this.

- I’ve had the appendicitis, offered another novice.

No one was impressed or amused by that. They didn’t doubt it hurt, but it was a civilian disease.

- And was your heart ever broke? Did it bleed?

They all laughed at that, even the new men.

- I had such a boil once, said perhaps the oldest there, through a grille of stained and broken teeth, that I should have welcomed the attentions of a Turkish lancer. If he’d known his business.

 - And where did you have this terrible infection?

 - Sevastopol. Or in the Black Sea region, at any rate.

 - Tell them about the wolf, Weyland, said McAllister.

 - Shall I? Shall I though?

 - They’ll need to hear it now.

 - I do believe the Colonel thought of it. I remember him saying something like, ‘I want to have some fun. Some nasty fun’. Was that about the wolf? It became about the wolf somehow, afterwards, if not. We had this wolf, see. Captured it, one way or another. Dog or bitch I don’t know now. I don’t think it matters much with wolves. It was a big beast, or grew big. Giant, perhaps. Grey as a ghost. As grey as dust. The fur was harsh to the touch as though frozen; its breath like a furnace. A dog is for darkness, they say. It was the forest, the outside, and we dragged it into our home. We captured it near the barrow I think I heard tell, and it bit a man there, but not so bad.

Well, we had him roped and the idea was to bring him in, surround him, with ourselves, and let him loose inside a ring of men. We had been drinking plenty. The Colonel’s brandy. Powerful stuff. And we linked arms around this wolf, forty men perhaps in the great mess hall and we let him go. The knot of the wolf-rope was cut. We subjected ourselves to the judgement of a wolf. How would he get out? Which man in that wall of red meat and muscle was an unlocked door, a broken gate? Let the wolf choose. His hackles rose in courage or fear. We had no weapons but boots and fists, scabbards and spurs maybe, or so we thought. Forty against one, but the wolf need not fight forty men, just find the right one, the one who would break. So he went for us straightaway and that sweating wall of red, it buckled and it swayed but it did not break. We took his fangs and his breath and the butts of his great grey head. We kicked him away and he’d try another fellow, one who had maybe more of a fear on him. We made this elastic red wall around him, beating like a crazy heart. We threw fire at him. Struck at him with the stick the savages carry fire with. Just to rile him, that much was allowed. That red heart beat fast, but it did not burst. The valves fluttered. We were a hollow square and the enemy inside. We yielded ground. He charged. We fell backward, then rallied. We fought with backs to the wall, sallied and pursued all advantage. The shuddering collisions. He bit like a dragon. Our hands and boots were red with our blood or his. Our purpled hands did reek and smoke. He was like a shark and we were the sea in which he swam. He tired, and dipped his head to lap at a puddle of blood, which dripped from his glistening wounds, perhaps. The rusty riddles in his iron pelt. His flank began to be raw. He was cunning; he hung a paw as though it were broken and then he would leap at a throat. He would catch a man and that man would chew his own tongue for the pain until a fellow could knock him away. The baffled beast slunk and prowled. He had never been so hurt. He gasped in shrill sobs. There was a general susurration at any vicious cut as though the air were escaping from the gape. He gouged and so did we. Blood pushed out of us in gouts, but who would be the man to call stop? And the wolf could not. We did not know if we were wolves or men. I felt I was in a heated room buried deep beneath the earth and washed with dark and unnamed rivers. In the end, and there has to be an end, the wolf was killed with a hammer, which came from I know not where. Was it so? It is not so easy to say what dies and what survives when the outside is brought inside. When the men put the head of that hammer in the bucket to clean it off, the water hissed. And anyway I got this.

The speaker laid his right hand flat on the table and the new men drew close to look at his blue thumb which was so tormented that it looked as though it had been taken off and reattached the wrong way round.

- It had got me at the back of the jaw and chewed me hard there. The worst pain I ever felt.

- What do you make of these tales, Colonel?

- Sleights of hand and moonshine. A lot of it.

Garnet nodded. He poured himself a little of Mountjoy’s brandy but he did not put it to his lips.

- Montreal, Colonel, would like to know. About you. What you might be willing to tell. Whatever you are willing to say you must say to me, now.

- That, Captain Garnet, could be what the theologians call ‘a dark mystery’. My desires are bloody, wolvish, starved and ravenous. That’s Shakespeare.

He shuffled over to the little row of books that he might have called his library, the shuffling attributable to the silver chains about his ankles, and took a New Testament from the shelf.

- I was blooded in the hunt as a very young boy, you know, the fox’s brush on either cheek. That could have been before I heard such words as these. That I do not say for sure.

He began to read,

- I heard the angels of the waters say, just art thou in thy judgements...for they shed the blood of thy people and thy prophets and thou hast given them blood to drink.

Also,

- The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun; and it was allowed to burn even with its flames. They were fearfully burned; but they only cursed the name of God...and they refused to repent or do him homage.

He paused with his finger in his place, although Garnet had noticed that he did not need to read when quoting from the book.

- Pertinent, don’t you think? And you know the Word of God will appear with his garment drenched in blood.

- It is pertinent, Colonel, but it is not unique to yourself. There are things that only you have done. Every officer in this army knows about the colonel summoned across the battlefield by his Lordship only for that colonel to send by return his compliments but that the colonel could not attend upon his Lordship because he is so tired. That legend has been told about many officers, but it is only true of you.

Mountjoy appeared to be uninterested in what he took to be this flattery,

- Your standards erode. You do what you have to do and you become what you have done.

He put the book down on Garnet’s table, touched the dry flower with the tips of his fingers and moved back to the fire.

- What was unthinkable becomes one of your memories. Shame fades. You get used to doing what is necessary and it comes easily. Ever fought a duel, Garnet?

Garnet shook his head.

- There was one important one. Personally, I found being shot at...I think the word is ‘liberating’. It clarified relations between my antagonist and I. We knew what we thought of one another, knew what use we had for one another. Life is satisfyingly simple when a man points a gun at you. I shot him in the groin. I’m not even sure that I meant to. I don’t mind telling you I am not a very good shot. It was a terrible wound. The fellow screamed for three days and then survived, sadly. Shadow of the man. A hero reduced to a coward. He could no longer bluster in front of us after we had heard him squeal. Naturally I apologised, although there was no need.

- You have had wounds of your own.

- Oh yes. Taste of the gangrene once. That was touch and go.

- There is one significant incident that I was advised to mention...

- Not that it makes the slightest difference, interrupted the Colonel, but do go on.

Garnet leafed through his papers once more, but he did not recite from them.

- It is said you murdered a fellow officer, on the field, by deliberately firing a volley of ordnance at him from the battery of which you had charge.

- That is completely beyond proving and would have been the most tremendous shot had it been accomplished. Right across our own lines.

The Colonel took the trouble to straighten his whiskers and winced as the silver chain grazed his chin.

- I must deny that. What bravado to kill a single man with a cannon. Nor was I actually with the battery as the shot was fired. I was riding at pace towards my alleged victim.

- You did not kill a single man, Colonel, there were many casualties. And I know that you were quickly on the scene of those deaths because your conduct was the subject of report.

Garnet held the relevant paper in his hand.

- One man had you bending over the dying officer in a manner reminiscent of Hardy on the bridge of the Victory.

- That I also feel tempted to deny. It’s in poor taste, but I suppose it won’t hang me.

- The officer of the neighbouring battery reported a manifestation of what he suggested was a supernatural phenomenon. He claims to have seen, through his field glasses, ‘an obscene, bulbous maggot’ doing what he called ‘predating’ the dying and the dead.

Mountjoy guffawed.

- Broken canvas, billowing, flapping round in the wind. An exploded tent most likely. Commonplace thing. That fellow had probably never been under fire before.

- If that officer had lived to see the end of that engagement, Colonel, I doubt we would have it to speak of now.

Mountjoy stared into the flames of the fire and kicked the log again. The sparks shone in the sweat of his face and he spoke now in a quieter voice than he had been using, more the voice of a man than of a colonel,

- I know that I disgust you, Garnet, but I know too that you are jealous of me. I have had a kind of life of which you will know nothing, almost certainly.

Garnet remained quiet.

- What will you do with me, Garnet? What do you intend?

Garnet still did not speak, but stared meaningfully into the fire and the Colonel nodded his head.

- The roar of insatiate Hell. That’s Virgil.

- I know, said Garnet.

- Garnet, I have had decades of this. Much longer, even, than you know. I have served. He stepped towards the Captain and the men also all took a step forward.

- The Empire has made a Minotaur of me. I have lived in a labyrinth of gunsmoke. Do you realise that when you step through that door, one of us must be martyred?

- I am here. It is too late to threaten me.

Mountjoy returned to his glass, the chains making an old man of him.

- You can throw me into a volcano, Captain. I am tired of myself. But what will become of you, after this burning? It will enter your vocabulary. It will no longer be unspeakable.

He straightened himself, recovering his soldier’s bearing. The silver chains chimed softly.

- Captain, it may no longer be appropriate for me to speak of being afraid, but if it were, I would say that whenever I open a door upon danger, what I most fear, is the possibility that I will find waiting there, some version of myself. Do you ever think of that, Garnet?

All of the men could not help but look toward the door.