The battle fought at Saint Quentin was the major engagement of the whole war, with conventional troops charging the English line-of-defence from two sides at once, and a platoon of Brobdingnagians wading amongst the fighting with studied, slow-footed seriousness, smashing and killing about them with long, weighted pikes—sixty foot long, and carrying nearly a ton of metal shaped at the killing end. And the cannonaders wrought havoc. One colonel lost his colour completely as he read the paper containing the casualty figures after the battle. "If this number were pounds rather than corpses," he told his aide de camp, "we would be wealthy indeed." His bon mot went around the camp. The English Army, the soldier joked grimly, was wealthy indeed in corpses, but poor in terms of the sovereign. The Commander in Chief was still hanging men for High Treason, because this joke had passed their lips, when the rest of the army had retreated to the coast. He himself left on a sapient horse as French forward-troops broke through the camp and past the dangling bodies.

From Quentin the English fell back across the Pas de Calais. Orders to establish a series of redoubts were ignored, or heroically followed to the death of everyone concerned. Commanders attempted to co-ordinate an evacuation on the beaches around Calais-town, but the French pressed their advantage and embarkation turned to rout. Eventually the Brobdingnagians swam through again, pulling boats down to perdition from underneath. Commanders fled the scene in small skiffs. There was screaming, weapon's-fire, commotion and confusion. The English losses were even worse than they had been at the battle of Saint Quentin.

Corpses sank to the bottom of the Manche as stones, or bobbed on the surface, tangled with the waves, or rolled and trundled dead in the surf, sand in their mouths and in their hair, in their sightless eyes.

Bates followed the news, reading the hastily printed news-sheets with a fearful avidity. He wanted the French repulsed, like any Englishman. But he wanted the French victorious, and with it the noble God-endorsed cause to which he had devoted so much of his adult life. He didn't know what he wanted. He wanted to sleep, but he could only toss and roll on his dirty sheets.

His servant vanished. This abandonment didn't surprise him. Everywhere, people were leaving the capital.

The premier and troisième corps de géants walked and swam the channel, pulling troop-barges behind them. The army beached at Broadstairs. The English army, with all reserves called up and all available men under orders, assembled themselves on the hills south of Canterbury. Travellers and passengers began carrying word-of-mouth reports of the fighting. Terrible, like the end of the world, they said. It be the world's end, a preacher was saying on Gad's Hill. These gigantic men are God's wrath.

The flood of people from London increased.

Bates found his mood undergoing one of those peculiar bubblings-up that correlated only poorly to his surroundings. He took to rising relatively early, and walking the streets of London with a dispassionate, observer's eye. He watched servants load belongings onto carts outside lankily opulent town houses in Mayfair; watched shopkeepers fitting boards over their windows, whilst their wives wrapped whimpering Lilliputians in handkerchiefs for the journey. On the Great North Road a great worm of humanity pulsed away to the horizon, people walking, trudging, hurrying or staggering, hand-carts and horse-carts, men hauling packs stacked yards high with clinking pots and rolled cloth, women carrying children, animals on tight tethers. Bates stood for an hour or more watching the stream of people trudge on, as seemingly sourceless and endless as the Thames itself. Militiamen trotted by on horseback, hawkers cried wares to the refugees, clockwork aerial craft buzzed up and down the rank, left and right across it.

Eventually, Bates wandered back into the city, and went to his club to take luncheon. Only Harmon was there, and one cook in the back-room. "Dear me," Bates muttered. "What's happened here." Harmon was all apologies, a good man in trying times. "Luncheon should not present problems, sir, if you'd care to eat."

Bates ate. His thoughts kept returning to the war. Could the Generals, perhaps, be persuaded that England was losing the war because it had flouted God's ordinance? A general proclamation from Parliament freeing the Lilliputians, and God's radiance would smile on His people again—surely? Surely?

He wandered, pensive, taking twice his normal time back to Cavendish Square. A stranger, dressed in an anonymous brown, was waiting outside his front door.

"Sir?" he said, starting forward. "You are Mister Bates?" The words were enough to reveal that his accent was French.

Bates felt suddenly panicky, he wasn't sure why. "What do you want?"

"Calm yourself, sir, calm yourself," said the stranger. "You are a friend of Mister D'Ivoi, I believe?"

"D'Ivoi," said Bates. "Yes."

"I bring a message from him. Could we go inside your apartment?"

"Your army is in Kent, sir," said Bates, his fight-or-flight balance teetering towards the aggressive again. "It loots Kent as we speak, sir."

The stranger only said: "I bring a message from him."

"Swiftness is to be desired, sir," he said. "I apologise for my English, for the speaking. You will pardon my expression?" Without waiting for an answer, he went on. "Mister D'Ivoi has asked for you particularly." He enunciated every syllable of this latter word with care. "He, and I, ask for your help. You have faith in our cause, I believe."

"Cause."

"For the Pacificans. For the little and the great, of the people. The Holy Father has declared the war a holy war, to free these creatures from their bondage. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Our army will soon be in London. We wish for you to do something for us, which it will make more swift the ending of the war. If you do this thing for us, the war will end sooner, and the holy cause achieved."

"Yes," said Bates. His mouth was dry.

"In this satchel there is a person."

"Satchel?"

The stranger bowed. "Is the word incorrect? I apologise. This sack, this bag."

"No, sir, I understand the word."

"Please, will you take this satchel to the Tower of London. It is this tower which is the command position for the defence of London, as we believe. The generals, the munitions, the forces, they gather there. The person inside the satchel will be able to work such things as to … to make more swift the ending of the war."

"There is a Lilliputian in the bag?"

The stranger bowed, and opened the flap of the satchel. A Lilliputian unhooked himself from a small padded harness inside and climbed out to stand, at attention, on the tabletop. Bates, as amazed and as unsettled as he always was in the presence of these tiny beings, smiled, made his smile broader, opened his mouth to show his teeth as if he were going to eat the thing. The Lilliputian stood, motionless.

"He has a training, a special training," said the stranger. "He is a warrior of great courage, great value. If I were to approach the Tower I would be shot, of course. And the naked streets are dangerous places for the little men, with traps and cats and all things like this. But if you were to bear the satchel, you would be able to release him inside the fort. Yes?"

"I know nobody in the Tower of London," said Bates. "I have no contacts in the army."

"You go to the Tower, and tell them that you bear a message from Colonel Truelove."

"I do not know the gentleman."

"He is captured, but we believe that the … English, excuse me, that you … do not know that he is captured. You will present to the guards and tell them that you bear a message from him, for attention of General Wilkinson only, for the General only. Once inside, find a quiet place to release the warrior from the satchel."

Sunlight laid squares on the floor. Light is a weight upon the earth, a mighty pressure from above, and yet it is constituted of the tiniest of particles.

Bates felt as if the moment of choice had already passed behind him. He did not have the language to phrase a rejection. All he could say was: "I will do this thing."

27 November 1848

The Frenchman had insisted on the urgency of his mission, and had pressed Bates until he offered up a promise to undertake it the following dawn. "Dawn, mind, sir," said the Frenchman, before leaving. "If we co-obstinate …"

"Co-ordinate," corrected Bates.

"Just so. If we co-obstinate, such that the little warrior is inside the Tower at the right moment, then we can complete the war much sooner. Much sooner."

He departed, with a gait that looked to Bates like an insolent jauntiness. But it was much too late for regrets. He shut his door, pulled up a chair and sat opposite the miniature human on the tabletop.

"Good evening, my friend," he said.

The Lilliputian was silent.

There was some uncanny aspect to them, Bates thought to himself. He could not feel comfortable in their company. They unsettled him. He tried to visualise them as toys, or marionettes, but then they would shiver in some inescapably human way, or their little eyes would swivel and stare, as if penetrating beneath the decorous levels of manner and behaviour. They carried within them a strange elision. They were sylphs, but they were also and at the same time devils.

But it was too late for regrets.

"You are reticent, my friend," he said. "I cannot blame you if you harbour resentment against the English peoples. My people have committed … terrible crimes against … your people."

The Lilliputian said nothing. Was his silence the outward sign of some savage indignation?

"Believe me," Bates went on, "I am your friend. I have devoted my life to your cause."

Nothing.

It occurred to Bates that the Lilliputian might not speak English. "Mon ami," he began, but his French was not good. "Mon ami, j'espère que …"

The Lilliputian turned on his heel, clambered back inside the satchel, and was gone.

Sleepy-headed, Bates found this hard to follow.

"We must be on our way," cried the Lilliputian. "We must be on our way."

"It is still dark," Bates grumbled, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with the calf of his arm.

"But it will be light soon."

"You speak English."

The Lilliputian did not say anything to this.

Bates rose and lit a lamp, dressing rapidly. He used yesternight's bowl of water to rinse his face, laced his feet into his boots and looked about him. The Lilliputian was standing beside the satchel.

"You are eager to go to war, my little friend," Bates said.

The morning had a spectral, unreal feel about it: the citrus light of the lamp, the angular purple shadows it threw, the perfect scaled-down human being standing on the table.

"I am a warrior," it piped.

"But we must remember that Jesus is the Prince of Peace."

The little figure slanted his head minutely, but did not reply.

"Well well," said Bates. "Well well, we shall go."

The little figure slipped inside the case.

Locking the door to his rooms felt, to Bates, like sealing off his life entire. Perhaps I shall die, he said, but his mind was so muzzy with tiredness that the thought carried no sting. Perhaps I shall never return here. But he didn't believe that, not really. He did not truly believe that.

His fingers slipped and fumbled at his coat buttons, and then hoisting the case with its precious cargo and striding out.

The light was growing, as his heels sounded on the pavement in Cavendish Square. The air was chill. The western horizon was still a gloomy and impressive purple, but the sky to the east was bright, the colour of malaria, with the morning star a dot of sharp light like a tiny window, immeasurably far off, open in the wall of an immense yellow citadel.

At the top of Charing Cross Road Bates saw a solitary person in the otherwise deserted streets, a hunched over infantryman stumbling, or hurrying, north. He was nervous enough to draw back into the shadow of a doorway, and then rebuked himself and strode on. He imagined sentry-questions. Who goes there? An Englishman! A loyal Englishman! God save the King! What's in the bag? Nothing—sir—nothing at all, save some personal belongings … but that would be easily disproven, a quick search would reveal his true carriage. Papers! Papers for the general … to be perused by him alone. To be seen by his eyes only! Would that satisfy a sentryman?

He walked on, and the dawn swelled in brightness all around him.

By the time he reached Holborn the sounds of fighting were unignorable.

From a distance the cannon-fire sounded like the booming of bitterns over estuary flats, or the stomach-rumble of distant thunder. But once down the dip and up the other side of Holborn the battle seemed to swoop out of the imaginary into the real with appalling swiftness. Knocks and bangs three streets away, two, and then rifle fire tattering the air, men in beetroot uniforms with bayoneted rifles trotting en masse, or hurrying singly from firing-position to firing-position.

Bates was fully awake now.

He ducked down one side street, and then another, trying to stay clear of the scurrying military action. He was vividly aware of the stupidity of his position; a civilian, an unarmed and inexperienced man wandering the streets in the midst of a war. A bomb swooned through the air, exploding somewhere away to his left with a powerful crunch.

Panic took him for ten minutes, during which time he dropped the satchel and tried to claw his way through a barred oak door. When his right fingernails were bloody the panic seemed to ebb from him, leaving him panting and foolish. He retrieved the satchel, hurried to the end of the street, turned a dog-leg and found himself on the riverside.

The sun at its low angle, with sunlight trembling off the water, turned the river to metal. Bates hurried on. Fifty yards downriver and he was at the deserted toll-booth of London Bridge's Middlesex side.

"You there!" called somebody. "Hold yourself! Friend or foe!"

Bates stopped. "An Englishman!" he called.

From where he was standing he could look down upon the bridge, and across the pale brown rush of the river. The Thames's flow seemed enormous, the water standing up at the leading face of the bridge's pillars in burly, muscular lips, the trailing edge leaving deep scores in the surface that broke into wakes and ripples hundreds of yards further downstream. Riflemen hurried along the half-completed embankment, ducking behind the unplaced stone-blocks, or jumping into the holes where such blocks were yet to be placed. The sound of horses' whinnying, like metal skittering over ice, was in the air from somewhere on the other side of the river. An artillery unit laboured with a recalcitrant field gun, poking its snub over the bridge's parapet. On the river's surface, a boat jockeyed against the fierce pull of the water, three sets of oars flicking up and down like insect legs to keep the boat alongside a small quay onto which soldiers were alighting.

And then, with the sounds of multiple detonation, smoke flowered into the air. French dart-shells hurtled over the horizon, threads against the sky, and careered into the masonry alongside the river with astonishing vehemence. The ground shook; ripples shuddered across the face of the water; stone cracked and puffed into the air as smoke. Bricks, pillars and blocks tumbled and clattered. More explosions. The tick-tock of bullets, British rifle fire, although Bates couldn't see what they were firing at. Then the giants came; heads rearing up like the sun over the horizon, but these suns followed by bodies, and the bodies supported on enormous legs. They strode up the river, the water blanching into foam about their shins. They were dressed in crazily-patched leather clothes, padded with numerous metal plates that were too poorly burnished to gleam in the light. With the sun behind them, four marched.

He was so stunned by the sight as to not understand how much in shock he was. He blinked, and turned. People were rushing on all sides, faces distorted as they shouted. He blinked again, turned again. The French, soldiers of ordinary size, were visible on the south bank, some firing over the water, some attempting to cross the bridge. English troops were defending the position. Bates stood in the midst of it, a single gentleman in modest but expensive clothing, his coat buttoned all the way to his chin, carrying a leather satchel briefcase. One of the English soldiers, hurrying to the bridge, caught his eye. "You!" he yelled. "You!"

Still numb to his surroundings, Bates turned to face him. Smoke misted up and swirled away, to an orchestral accompaniment of clattering explosions.

Everybody was looking north. Bates followed their glances. Another thunderstroke.

One of the Brobdingnagians was standing over the dome of Saint Paul's. He had driven his metal-tipped staff through the shell of it, as if breaking the blunt end of an egg. He lifted it out, and struck again, and the dome collapsed leaving a fuzzy halo of dust.

Bates turned to look for the soldier who had accosted him. He was not standing where he had been standing. Bates looked around, and then looked down, and saw him lying spreadeagled on the floor. Blood, dark and taut like poured molasses, was pooled all around him.

The sounds of battle became chuckles and creaks. It took him a moment to realise that the fighting was moving away, sweeping round beyond the wrecked cathedral and into the fields to the north. He fiddled with the catch on the briefcase and whispered inside, although as he did so he was struck by how peculiar it was to be whispering.

The street was deserted.

The Lilliputian's high-pitched voice warbled from its hidden place. "You must go on."

"I will be killed," said Bates, a trill of nerves shaking the last word. He felt close to tears.

"Death is the soil of the world," said the Lilliputian, the oddness of the sentiment made stranger still by the ethereal, piping voice that uttered it.

"I will wait here until the fighting has stopped," said Bates. Saying so brought him a trembly sense of satisfaction: to be safe, not to die, to stay hidden until the danger had passed.

"No," said the Lilliputian. The timbre of his voice had changed. Somehow, Bates could not see how, he had slipped out of the case and climbed up the coat. He stood on Bates's shoulder, and with a shimmer was on his face. Tiny pressure on his ear, a tickling sensation of an insect on his cheek. Bates could not repress a shudder, a raising of his eyes to swat the spider that had the gall to touch his face—to touch his face! Only an effort of will, consciousness, prevented him from slapping at the little creature. I must not! He thought. God's creature! So easy to crush it out of life … but no, no, I must not, never, never.

Blurrily close to his eyeball, the pink-yellow shape of a head, a lash-like hand, dissolved by nearness. "This thorn," warbled the Lilliputian, "is a weapon. I can thrust it into your eye, and it will explode, a bomb." Bates blinked furiously. "If you attack me I will have your eye." Bates blinked again. His eye was watering; his breaths were coming much more swiftly. "If you do not move now, to go to the Tower, I will have your eye."

"My dear little friend," said Bates, high-pitched. "Mon share amy."

"The Brobdingnagians live to be a hundred and fifty years of age," came the sing-song rapid little voice. "They are wary of death, for death is a rarity to them. But we of Lilliput live a quarter as long, and hold death in a quarter as much worth. We are a nation of warriors."

"My dear little friend," said Bates, again.

"Go now." And the tickling sensation vanished from his face, the ornament-like pressure removed from his ear. When Bates had regained his breath the Lilliputian was back in the satchel.

He had no idea of the time. Certainly the morning was advanced now, the sky was crowded with ivory-coloured thunderheads. Spots of rain touched his face, and Bates thought of contemptuous Lilliputians spitting upon his skin.

There was a great deal of military activity around the Tower; mounted troops jittered by, their horses glittery with sweat, or rain, or both; cannons were positioned at all places, sentries doing their clockwork sentry-business, chimney-smoke and noise and business and camp-followers, all the melee. It seemed odder to Bates than the battle he had just witnessed. He shouldered the satchel, its occupant like some wasp, striped with its own uniform; and yet, who could say, why not angelic as well? And there was the tower itself, London's tower as white as ice, blocky like teeth, standing taller over him, his parent, his nationhood's parent. It did not look inviting.

Nobody challenged him as he marched up the causeway until he had come within ten yards of the closed main gate, with its lesser gate inset and open. "Who goes there?" yelled the sentryman, although he was only a foot or so from Bates. "General Wilkinson! shouted Bates, startled into life. "I bring a message for General Wilkinson!" His heart stuttered. "I have a message for the General's ears only! From Colonel Truelove!"

Entering the Tower had been simple in the end. The guard had looked inside the satchel, but only cursorily and without penetrating deep enough to unearth the miniature warrior concealed inside. He had slipped through the inset door, the flap a twelfth the size of the great gates which were not opened, and hurried past the buzz of people within, over the inner quad, through another door and to a coign in an empty corridor. And there he had released the Lilliputian warrior, who had emerged from the bag with threads of rope coiled over his shoulder, and his own miniature satchel on a belt around his waist. He had not bade Bates farewell, but had scurried off.

Bates had loitered, nervously, around the Tower, and then had slipped amongst a crowd of engineers and kitchen-servants as they exited the Tower, and after that had slipped into deserted streets in Whitechapel.

Perhaps he expected to hear some titanic explosion, the arsenal beneath the Tower exploded by the fierce little Lilliputian; perhaps he expected the cheers of French troops. But although his ear was repeatedly distracted by bangs, knocks, creases of sound in the air, yells, tatters of song, aural flotsam, he heard nothing that matched the imagined cataclysm of his heart.

Much later in the afternoon, ashamed at his own instincts for cowardice, he had ventured out from this house, and wandered the city. He came across one body, in a British uniform, and then a clutch more of them. A print shop's windows had been broken in to make a placement for a field gun, but the gun's barrel was sheared and broken as a daisy, and its crew lay in a tangle of blackened arms and legs around it. Southward brought Bates out on the river again. Here there were more bodies. Bates went to the water's edge and sat down. On the far side of the river broken buildings bannered smoke into the evening air.

There was nobody around. It was as if London were a dead city.

The river hushed below him, like breathing.

I have killed my city, thought Bates, his mood flowing away from him now like the river itself, his spirits draining into the hidden sinks of despair. I am a traitor, and I have killed my city.

An irregular splashing to the west intruded on his attention. Upriver he could see one of the giants, sitting on the bank with its legs in the water for all the world like a small boy beside a tiny stream. The giant kicked his legs, languidly, intermittently, sending up house-sized bulges of water up to trouble the surface. Behind him, the tip of the sun dipped against the river, colour bleeding from it into the water like watercolour paint from a paintbrush being washed after a day's work.

With desperate, self-detesting resolution Bates started towards the figure; this giant surveying the ruins he had made of the world's greatest city. "Monsieur!" he called. "Monsieur!"

He ran for ten minutes before he was close enough for his gnat's-voice to reach the great flappy ears. "Monsieur! Monsieur!"

The Brobdingnagian turned his head with the slowness of a planet revolving.

"I am here Monsieur!" squeaked Bates. "Down here Monsieur!"

The eyelids rolled up, great blinds, and the carpet-roll lips parted. "Good day," said the giant.

And now that he was standing beside the creature, Bates realised he had no idea what he had intended in coming over. "Forgive me, sir," he said. "Forgive me for approaching you. Is the battle over?"

"I can barely hear you," grumbled the giant, its sub-bass voice rolling and coiling in the evening air. "Allow me to lift you." And with sluggish but minute patience the enormous hand presented itself, so that Bates could step into the palm. The quality of the skin was not in the least leathery, as he expected it to be; it was douce, though strong, with some of the quality of turf. And then he was lifted into the air, and brought before the enormous benign face. Bates could see the pores, a thousand rabbit-holes in the cliff-face; could see the poplar-stubs of unshaved beard, the tangle of hair in the nostril like winter trees.

"Thank you monsieur," he said. "Is the battle over?"

"It is," said the giant.

"Are the French victorious?"

Every flicker of emotion was magnified, as if the great face were acting, over-acting, each expression. "You are French?"

"No sir, no sir," Bates gabbled. "But a sympathiser, sir. I am an ally of France, an ally, that is to say, of its great cause, of freedom for Pacificans, of freedom against slavery and the upholding of God's law."

"Your voice is too small, and too rapid," rumbled the voice. "I cannot follow your speech."

"I am a friend to the Brobdingnagian people," said Bates more slowly and more loud. "And the Lilliputians."

A smile, wide as a boulevard. "The tiniest of folk. Our fleas are bigger than they. Some of my people," he grumbled on, benignly, "do not believe they exist, never having seen them. But I am assured they do exist, and I am prepared to believe it."

There was silence for a moment. The light reddened deeper into sunset.

"The day is yours?" Bates asked again.

"The army of France is victorious."

"You do not seem happy."

"Melancholia," said the giant, drawing the word out so that it seemed to rumble on and on, a sound like heavy furniture being dragged over the floor. "To observe a city broken like this. We Brobdingnagians are a peaceful people, and such destruction …" He trailed off.

"But your great cause," chirruped Bates. "This victory is a great thing! It will mean freedom for your people."

"The France-army," said the giant, "possess a machine of the greatest ingenuity. I have seen it; no bigger than a snuff-box, yet it computes and calculates and solves all manner of problems at a ferocious rate. So swiftly it works! It is this machine that has won the war, I think. This machine. Its strategy, and its solution to problems. This machine." He hummed and hoomed for a while. "My people," he continued, "my people are ingenious with machines, but never so ingenious as your people. You are small, but cunning. Perhaps the others, the Lil, the Lilli …"

"The Lilliputians."

"Just so, perhaps they are more ingenious even than you? The smaller the more cunning? This may be God's way of ordering his universe. The smaller the more cunning."

"I have long been an ally of France," Bates declared. His spirits, sunken only minutes before, were rising again, following their own unfathomable logic. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps my betrayal truly followed a higher good. Perhaps it is for the best. After defeat, England will abandon its persecution of the Pacificans, and soon after that its greatness will reassert itself. In ten years … maybe less. And it will be a more worthwhile greatness, because it will not flout God's ordinance. "I have long been an ally of France, and a friend of the Count D'Ivoi."

"D'Ivoi," said the giant. "I know him."

"You know him?"

"Indeed. Shall I take you to him?"

"Yes!" Bates declared, his heart flaring into fervour. "Yes! I will congratulate him on his victory, and on the new age of justice for Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians both!"

The enormous hand cupped him against the giant's shoulder, and he rose to his full height. The sun seemed to pull back from the horizon with the change in perspective, and then in lengthily slushing strides the giant marched down the river. He paused at the wrecked arches of London Bridge, stepping up onto the concourse and over it into the water again. In moments he was alongside the Tower. The troops outside the citadel were in French uniform; they scurried below, insect-like, apparently as alarmed by their gigantic ally as the British had been by the giants as foes. Cannon were hauled round to bear on the figure.

"A visitor for Monsieur le Comte," boomed the Brobdignagian. "A visitor for Monsieur D'Ivoi."

He placed Bates on the charred lawn before the main gate, and withdrew his hand.

"Monsieur?" An aide de camp was standing in front of him. "The Comte D'Ivoi will see you now."

Bubbling with excitement, Bates followed the fellow across the court and down a series of steps. Gaslit corridors, the stone wet with evening dew. Finally into a broad-groined room, lit by two-dozen lamps, brighter than day. And there was D'Ivoi, his absurd pigtail bobbing at the back of his head. A group of gorgeously uniformed men was sitting around a table.

"Bates, my friend," called D'Ivoi. "France has much to thank your for."

Bates approached, smiling. The generals at table were examining maps of the Southern Counties. Around them strutted and passed a stream of military humanity. In the corner, the size of a piano only taller, was an ebonywood box.

Of the generals, only D'Ivoi stood up. The rest of the generals were still eating, and pausing only to drink from smoky coffee-cups as wide as skulls.

"Bates, my friend," said D'Ivoi again.

They were eating pastries glazed with sugar that glistened as if wet.

"D'Ivoi," said Bates. He felt cheered to see his old friend, but something was wrong somewhere. He couldn't put his finger on it. He could not determine exactly what was wrong. It might have been that he did not want to determine what was wrong, for that would mean dismantling his buoyant feeling of happiness and achievement. And yet, like a pain somewhere behind the eyes, Bates knew something was wrong.

One of the generals looked up from the table. His ugliness was breathtaking, the left eyebrow and cheek were scored with an old scar, the eye itself glass and obnoxious. "Sit," said D'Ivoi.

The air in the room was not sweet: close and stale-smelling.

"I am glad my small action," said Bates, "was able to hasten the conclusion to this wasteful war."

One of the generals at table snorted.

"Did the Lilliputian warrior I ported here … did he survive?"

"He did his job very well," said D'Ivoi. "Although, alas, the war is not over yet. The English are resisting at Runnymede, with some skill and some force. But it will not be long! It will not be long, in part because of your labour. We, France, salute you."

"Ours is a nobler cause," said Bates, the words for a moment swimming his head with the thrill and honour of it all.

"Cause?" asked the General with the glass eye. It was impossible to look at his bunched, seamed face without one's glance being drawn to his hideous eye. Bates snapped his gaze away, and it fell on the box in the corner of the room.

"The Pope's latest decree," said D'Ivoi, and stopped. He noticed where Bates was looking. "Ah, my friend, your eye falls on our most valuable ally. The computation device!"

"So this is it," said Bates, distantly. The fact that there was something wrong was, somehow, intruding itself again. "The famous computation device."

"Truly," said D'Ivoi. "It has brought us further, and faster. It will change the whole world, this beautiful machine. Beautiful machine!"

"The Pope's latest decree?" queried the General. "C'est quoi ce que t'as dit?"

D'Ivoi gabbled something in French, too rapidly for Bates to follow. His own smile felt fixed, now. The light was too bright in this underground cavern. It slicked the walls. Centuries of the Tower, a prison. The giants Gog and Magog, or was it Bran? Bran the giant? Buried under Tower Hill, that was the story. Buried under the hill and the Tower built above it, pressing down on the enormous bones. A giant prison squashing the bones of a buried giant. How many people had seen the inside of this chamber, and never seen the light again? Centuries of people locked away, barred and closed and buried in the ground like blind stones in the mud.

Bates was stepping towards the device now. "It is marvellous," he muttered. "How does it work?"

D'Ivoi was at his arm, a touch on his elbow. "Ah, my friend," he said. "I cannot permit you to examine it too closely. You are a friend to France, I know, but even you must respect military secrets."

The box was coffin-black. It did not display any of its secrets on its exterior. "Of course," murmured Bates.

"As to how it works," D'Ivoi continued, steering Bates back towards the door of the room. "For that you will have to ask Mister Babbage. It is something like an abacus, I think; something like a series of switches, or rolls, or gears, or something like this. I do not know. I only know," he beamed, and took Bates's hand in his own. "I only know that it will win us the war. Goodbye, my friend, and thank you again."

Bates was half dazed as he walked from the room. A guard eyed him. He walked half-aware up the stairway. There were certain things he should not think about. That was it. That was the best way. Bury thought, like the giant buried under the hill. Certain things he should not think about. He should not think of the French troops ranging out across the fields of England, of other towns burning, of the smoke rising as a column from the heart of the kingdom. Should not think of the blood draining out of bodies, pooling like molasses, dark in the sunlight. Should not think of giant men working to the extinction of their race at brute tasks, menial tasks, hauling logs or working great engines until their sturdy bodies gave out in exhaustion. Should not think of the Computational Device in the corner of the oppressive underground room. Not imagine opening the front of the device and looking inside. Or if he did think of this last, if he must think of it, then he should think of some giant clockwork device, some great rack of toothed-wheels and pins and rods, something wholly mechanical. But not think of a tight, close, miniature prison-cage, in which sweating rows of labouring tiny people worked at wheels and abacus racks, tied into position, working joylessly in the dark and hopelessness to process some machine for computation. Not that. He was on the top step now, and about to step back into the light, and the best thing would be to leave all that behind him, buried away below.