Alchemisland

Cobalt had discharged his newly-loaded pistol at point-blank range so whatever secrets Harpenden knew, about why what went down in Cairo went down, were utterly destroyed as the synapses which allowed the accrual of experiential knowledge turned first to puce mince then to sickly hot pink gravy against the garish yellow umbrella tops. Cobalt Byron, who had shot many, many men, who had seen many heads explode in and out of the picturehouse, formed an O with his mouth and stifled a gag. His mouth where, anticipating vomit, protective saliva pooled; body’s instinct to eject outside miasm.

The waiter and barman who had fled when the shooting commenced emerged from subterfuge. Cobalt, still ridden with adrenaline, instinctually raised his weapon. He flicked effortlessly between targets like a Time Crisis pro, his wrist loose, his aim steadfast. The waiter stayed his colleague’s advance and raised his palms in supplication, gesturing toward their unarmed persons, their flimsy apron belts free of martial adornment. His fright-widened eyes met Cobalt’s unwavering glare and their wills battled invisibly like radiation and cancer. The waiter daring to inch forward once more caught his foot on a chunk of fallen masonry and tripped forward, his arms extended like a shooting wrestler. Cobalt’s brain told him to shoot but he ignored his instincts and stepped forward to intercept the falling man, who waifully collapsed into his waiting arms like the Pieta’s ruined Christ. Their faces inches apart. In a single movement, a dancer’s instinct to sweep and dip, Cobalt corrected the waiter’s posture, set him on his feet and wiped the mantle of dust from his shoulders. The barman who had wisely snuck for cover again reemerged and shamefacedly swept across the ruined shack to join his friend. 

W: I need a drink, who wants one?

The waiter vaulted to the bartop and slid himself along its length before leaping over to land on its business side. He perused shelves of coloured bottles racked in front of a large rectangular mirror so effaced with scrapes that it made Christ’s scourged back look in decent knick. He selected a quarter-full bottle of Jameson and brought the cool green glass to his brow, ran it down his cheek to his lips, kissed it like he never thought to kiss again. When he had finished ravishing what Irish people call the water of life and what the temperance movement calls cordiality’s anathema, he again vaulted athletically across the bartop, then gestured for Cobalt to ready a half second before he chucked it; the bottle spun like an emerald shuriken. Cobalt raised his arm like he was aiming his pistol. His splayed fingers like bars on the sun. The shadows of his fingers on his sunlit face like warpaint. He caught it midair mid-spin, grasped the neck sharply, screwed off and threw away the cap and gulped it down. He wolfed at it, shaking his head as the wince-inducing fire potion coated his throat and chest like pleasant death. Whiskey escaping his lips drew golden furrows along his chin; gold and blood upon his cheeks, upon the cyclopean flagstones of Minoan bull rooms. 

Cobalt wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He knelt and wiped his bloodstained gun barrel clean using Harpenden’s creased slacks. In the air, tendrils of writhing gun smoke curled around each other like ghost octopi. Cobalt extended his arm, offering whiskey to nobody in particular. One of the two grabbed it off him, he didn’t know which. 

He was caught in private rapture. The sting of a kill. The bitter cud of traded life. The silver river of mortal feeling. Wind in his hair like the stalk-shaking zephyrs winding through Elysium of heroes. Sheer delight at life. Greens greener, blues bluer, reds redder. Splattered against the ground were pinky bits of brain that his beretta had trepanned from Harpenden’s skull, languishing like wet dough. Impossibly vivid pink, as if alien plants had taken root among the mundane roots of the suburban community garden. The world’s spiteful beauty tricked you into seeing tenderness that wasn’t really there. Nature had neither sympathy nor humanity but the power of ages, the power to turn the wheel, and apathy borne of the furthest sight. How alive these moments after expected death; even the dust’s dance gobsmackingly alluring.

When sated the men brimmed with Dutch courage. They spoke loudly and senselessly, the diatribe of the saved damned. A sense of euphoria crept upon them and they laughed like Gulls at a ship’s sinking. Chortled at the violence they had experienced, its resemblance to play. Guffawed at their grazes and wounds, the paltry price of their lives. 

W, swinging the swigging bottle in his hands like a disgraced conductor leading concertos in his lightless bedchamber mirror: You English?

Byron spat, as if the word had left a taste in his mouth. When someone used that word, he thought of so many things good and bad: regency fops, Barry Lyndon, Queen, queens, sausage rolls, plantations, hell and Connacht, Cromwell, BEF, the battle of the Somme, Lord of the Rings, real ale, flowery well-maintained gardens, empire, cultural erasure, engineered genocide, laissez-faire, coffin ships, Trevelyan’s corn, Rourke’s Drift, Robert Graves, Brigadeer General Lowe, Mountbatten the royal pederast, Kincora boy’s home, The Specials, David Attenborough, The Detectorists, The Cairo Squad, Squaddies Tommies and Tans, revenge shearing, retributions, hosts of bloody Sundays, India, potato blight, tenant farmer evictions, racist cartoons, token Eurovision votes, fair play, good manners, by Jove, Shakespeare, Henry V, Brian Blessed, panel shows, mystical Albion, Trojan giants, Merlin, oppression, redcoats, stubbornness, stoicism, stella, the troubles, paramilitaries, Margaret Thatcher smashing the miners, skin and bone men in H block wearing suits made of human shit until Ulster is free, waste and ruin and death, sending it over dripping red to queen liza and her ladies, gunboats, martial force, pillared structures, the empire’s second city, the clumsy feel of dog bearla on my ancient granite tongue, austerity, statueless Protestantism, witch burnings, heretics, plots, bloodlines, KLF, William Blake, Moors Murderers, Aunty, Jim’ll fix it, glass eye rings for the royal necromancer, John Dee architect of empire born again in every age, Jim Verney sonic warfare, Rendlesham psy-op, Orford Ness, Ken Webster’s Vertical Plane, conspiracy, lineage, dirty old town, London Bridge, destriers and plumed helms, royal academies, pubs done right, green and pleasant land well tended and well presented, right to roam, shopkeepers all, second generation immigrants voting Brexit, Drill, unwritten epitaphs, imported Hellfire mischief, Dashwoods of West Wycombe, Mercia, noble names, Offa, English Heretic, Wessex, throws water on chavs, Rudimentary Peni, I can’t believe you’ve done this, tubercular Brontes and gin-glad Branwell’s latest failed venture, father is a vicar, Kingsley Amis, James Bond, Wodehouse, Strawberry Fields Forever, white cliffs of Dover, Coil, Carfax Abbey, Anglo-Irish, penal laws, mass rocks, priest hunters and priest holes, the end of the Gaels, the act of Union, lord protector, the Reformation, the antient churches harried, pie, miners down t’pit, built different, Brexit, 800 years of colonial occupation and suppression, Rome Rule Home Rule, executed rebel leaders, Kevin Barry, Willie and Padraic Pearse, Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmett, Michael Dwyer’s escape, the flight of the Earls, Tudors, the Tower of London, spymasters, invisible ink, the original 007 spoke Enochian, menhirs, ley lines, Dion Fortune, freemasonry, The Rippah, Big Ben bonging, news readers, guitar playing PM war priest, special relationship, peace in our time, constant war, the waves and rulership thereof, intercepting weapons, mastery of the air, architectural majesty, daring and ingenious engineering, city planning, dog walkers all, sitcoms, class differences, daft racists, Lonsdale polos, pitch capping, Dublin Castle, bayonet law, drinks and hooliganism, old firm, steel toe boots, harrington, skinhead, foreverblowingbubbles OI OI OI, punk, Millwall, Roy Shaw, Paul Sykes ‘these pumps’ and his tremendous sense of atmospheric changes, chatters and gab-gifted, funny, slagging, accentual diversity, things Cornish, marine lore, old old old stories, cobra mist, Blake’s 7, Inside No. 9, the uncanny, psychogeography, Mark Jenkins, Andy Sharp, Boudicca, Roman villas with underfloor heating, dead kings in car parks, Iain Banks, Terry Pratchett, The Great Beast 666 who we have lately seen about the town practising invisibility, cutting the first H off words, lyrical blows to the jaw, roadman ting slang like dis, Alan Moore, John Clare saddened at the vast shipwreck of his life’s esteems, Siegfried Sassoon’s mother’s seance for Hamo dead at Gallipoli, sea lords, the admiralty, the bracing life at sea, the tac, topsail yard, wormy biscuits, lousy hair, sore gums have an orange, Parklife, knife crime, diversity, koh-i-noor diamond, the green man, Dick Turpin, saucy bold robbers, pugilists, Broughton, Slack, English Martial Arts youtube channel, our man in Havana, sausage scam, Viscount Tredegar, OPJB last great secret of WW2, lawn fairs, whippin excursion, raves, no irony neo nazis, astral second world war, trains, portly gentlemen, country houses, insipid fleshwastes.

Byron finally answered: No I’m Irish, I’ll thank you to remember that. Every Irishman on holidays knows to ensure any barmen, hotel staff, waiters etc know that you’re Irish fairly early on, otherwise they’ll stick pubes in your eggs and lick the rim of your pint.

When the waiter translated this for the barman he broke into a smile, clapped twice then patted Byron’s back in congratulations. He fetched an old Glenfedditch bottle from the bar and insisted Cobalt drink some. 

Harpden’s body lay where it fell. In the height of day, the corpulent man’s cadaver began bloating obscenely. The tightening edges of his eye pods caused his rat eyes to jut out like a helmetless man’s on Mars. His swollen tongue, that stuck out the side of his mouth and lolled down over his scarlet chins as if trying to drink his own blood, had dried out revealing thousands of crisscrossing striations; australiastriations for him. Skin which in life sported a sickly, xanthous blend turned a pukey goblin green. His wound’s caked blood dried and flaked off, leaving weird honeycomb impressions around greening abscesses which no mage’s panacea could resolve. Above the growing corpse clouded throngs of blood-bloated flies, struggling to sustain their newfound hench. Thousands of them buzzing, zipping side to side, shiny black backs purple-gold in the right light; like the target site of a future miniature cluster bomb full of nano-horrors. They crowded his wounds, rabid for pus and desiccation. All the sugar he ate made his blood thick as porridge, it sagged rather than flowed from the wounds, and the carrion things were fast to it, invigorated by ichor charged by the delicacy of a two Mars Bars a day lifetime.  

By this time, Cobalt Byron’s halcyon euphoria had given way to an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. He wanted nothing more than to be back in his airy little beach shack, kicking off his shoes and starfishing on top of the covers. The mere idea of so doing paralyzed him, he could not imagine having to stand again, forget having to trek back along the coast road. No, he had to sit tight where he was recovering his strength, then he would set out. He had not spared a thought for the why, the how, or the what next; he thought only of respite, brief convalescence, the return of full sense. Obviously he was not deafened as he thought but his hearing on the shot side had diminished. When he and the shack staff sat around a table that they had corrected and set with glasses, he leant the elbow and ear of his better side forward. He found his neck could barely sustain his head’s weight, his cupped hand held his head up, a single pillar to carry the weight of the world. The men clinked their glasses and he did the same with his free hand, out of instinct more than obligation. 

His eyes fought to stay open. His burnt fingers and wrist stung. His ear throbbed, he didn’t dare check how bad it was. Doubtless, he had sustained countless yet-undiscovered wounds but it was difficult to pinpoint specific agonies on his angstridden shell so worn and lacerated. He cradled his consciousness, held it close and told himself he would not sleep. If he could just keep his eyes open, the pain should keep his limbs enlivened. How much easier said than done; his self fought his every attempt, desiring dark’s absolution, rest’s caress. 

The barman who had revealed his name as Gorgios slammed his empty tumbler on the metal tabletop. Cobalt who had only rested his eyes a moment, half a moment, jarred awake at the sound he took for a gunshot. His tempers rose such that he no longer contended with desire for sleep. His heart raced. When he had heard the sound, he thought that the agency had pinpointed his location, no doubt Croc Dundee there had a chipped watch, phone, maybe even live feed through his shades, and sent their Colonel Willard in for the kill. He couldn’t imagine that any agency in the world could respond so quickly. He only shot Harpenden a half hour ago. Besides, he was not the sort of arch criminal on whom battalions and scores of resources were utilised; or so he hoped. 

His paranoia returned, so much so that he took out his firearm and counted the bullets in his clip; he had used only one, the killshot. Still, despite his tension, he was glad that he hadn’t thought Gorgios or Stefanos, the waiter, were trying to shoot him. 

He lifted himself at great effort, wincing. “Right, we need to get this body sorted then I need to get back to my shack.”

Gorgios spoke first, bolder than before, probably because he knew there weren’t any Englishmen around. “Leave body to me. Owe favour.”

Byron arched a brow, thought about reaching for his gun, reached for witsabout instead. Wherewithal. Queried “Will I owe you one back?”

Gorgios’ right hand’s thumb and finger pinched together to form a rat head shape, some symbol of assurance with which Cobalt was unfamiliar. He took it to mean this favour brokered no further obligation on his part. 

Stefanos spoke up “He say no favour owed.”

B: “Context clues, chum”

Stefanos, who neither understood the retort nor appreciated its triple alliterative qualities, spoke on “I owe you a favour too, sir. Come. Come round the back to my jeep. I drive you to your place.”

B, his voice slow and commanding, his words carefully considered. “Slow the fuck down, both of yiz. This isn’t some backpacker you can say was raped and mugged by street urchins; this man is a high-level government agent. Questions will be asked. Men like him cost a lot to train, a lot to pay, a lot to clean up when they die. He’ll be chipped or tracked. They’ll be onto the fact that something’s awry. He arranged to meet me at a certain time, he would have given his handlers a ballpark time for when the killing would occur, and when he’d be in touch. Have you checked his pockets? If there’s a phone, see if anyone has called or texted recently and, if they have, at what time. You, Stefanos, go and drive your jeep around front. Meet us here in, say, twenty minutes. In the meantime, gather some useful supplies – if you have first aid kits, firearms, bullets, extra fuel for the car. Hell, I’d take a coffee if you had the wherewithal.”

Stefanos nodded and made off without a word, mouthing his orders in the spoken sequence like a solemn prayer. Cobalt turned to Gorgios who was dragging Harpenden’s body by the armpits, leaving a red smear in its wake. He did it mostly one-handed, the other busy swiping at flies chagrined at their feast’s disturbance and emboldened by the Australian’s adrenalized blood which they had consumed. The Greek met Cobalt’s eyes and, to his surprise, they were beaming above a toothy smile; he pointed a black-nailed finger at a gaping bore in the corpse’s thigh and asked “You like Greek story?”

Byron, like his namesake a graecophile weaned on classics, answered “Greek mythology? Yes, very much so.”

The Greek’s eyes sparkled all the more, like a falling torch spinning through a sapphire-lined tunnel. He pointed again to make sure Cobalt’s eye had noted the jagged crevasse exposing the raw, viscera-webbed musculature. “Zagreus.” He laughed.

Byron erupted into laughter of his own, laughing mostly at the Greek’s hearty, raspy chuckle, like how a living cigarette might sound in the audience at a comedy gig. He knew Zagreus, that old tale, but he’d never have thought to say it himself. He was Irish and respected almost nothing but he was raised to have solemn respect for the dead. He wouldn’t say it himself but it had been said so he’d laugh at it, and probably that was fine moral-wise. Sometimes, you meet vegans who’ll wear a secondhand leather jacket because sure it’s already there and the animal is already dead, and at least then the animal’s brave sacrifice was not needless. “Zagreus! Indeed, you mad fucker. Here, what’re you fixing to do with that body?”

“Is move, is stink. See flies?” Gorgios released the corpse, which slumped back to the floor, so he could swat the air with both hands, chopping like a ninja from an 80s film. 

“But after that, what do you intend to do with it?” Byron asked as he patted his shirt pocket in search of smokes.

“Don’t worry, Irish. Not first man die island. Not first man die coffee shack. First die bliss because coffee taste, eh?” Gorgios howled laughing, doubled over. He held his shaking stomach while the other stemmed his tears, letting flies recrowd around Harpenden’s host of delicious wounds. The Greek rifled in the wide-mouthed pocket of his grey roughspun trousers, coarse and thick like a yesteryear poet might wear at the Lake District, produced a box of smokes, flicked the bottom to shake one loose, took it from the box with his lips, fetched a lighter from the same pocket, lit it then tossed it to Byron, whose ready hand caught it like a kingship-conferring rod, held it aloft as if to say glory glory glory. 

Byron took a long drag then took another one before he exhaled. A mushroom cloud rapidly dissipated beyond the remit of his head. As he smoked the smoke trails moved slowly through humid air, forming a corona about his head; beams of aureate light, cloaking him in preference, marking him with difference. How magnetic he seemed just for just a moment; so daredevil puffing on his death stick after such a close shave. His hair had barely moved throughout the whole ordeal, rigid as a Pope’s piety with all the pomade he lacquered it with. “Thanks” Byron’s mouth moving unseen behind the expanding smoke.

“For me also” Gorgios narrated unnecessarily as he got his own smoke lit. “What is your name?”

“William Tellburroughs” Cobalt Byron reeled off the fake without a second’s hesitation “pleasure to make your acquaintance. As we established, I’m Irish. As you’ve seen, I’ve shot a fat Australian cunt in his mush. That’s his personality there” he used his smoke like a pointer to indicate a caterpillar of brain matter caught on the grille of a fallen standing heater “and that’s similar to other things I’d do regularly but not in a sadistic have a wank after kind of way. It’s all on the books.”

Gorgios who hadn’t caught most of this smiled at the words he recognized, and enjoyed that he had understood the final part of what Willie said. “Ah! You should say earlier. Gorgios big big reader. Show you library in mother’s house full of books. James Bond, you know this? He has girlfriend EIGHT vaginas” he made eight with his fingers, tucking both thumbs “and go to Moon easy peasy like you go to sister’s garden party. What books you write?”

Byron facepalmed, curse my flapping gums, then sought to correct course. He waved his hands as if to say ‘you have the wrong of it’. “No book, no writing. On the books, it means when something is above board, official.”

“Oh, sir. Please. So humble. Too humble. Depressed man, maybe? Books I am sure not boring, please tell Gorgios one mystology plot, eh?”

“We’re getting off the point here. Let’s get this body off the decking onto the sand where we can take stock of things.” said Byron, pointing to Bernie’s antipodean weekend.

“Ohhhhhhhhhh not writer. Understand now, Willie. Sorry for bad English. Better read than.. Say?”

“I know what you mean, Gorgios. I’m not a writer.”

“Yes, because you are stock man! Market man, business. Here on island very little tax and very sexy kids for big bank man, no? Come here, coffee with friend, stocks up maybe down and bad bad bad, have to shoot man in face”

Byron aghast rolled his eyes and growled in frustration. “Take stock. It means to see where you are at. Review everything to decide what comes next. Look, let’s just tarry a moment now and take a breath. There’s a lot of work to do.” 

The two men stood against the last standing section of bamboo palisade which formerly girdled the shack like a magic circle, and took manful drags from their smokes. Byron checked his defaced but functional watch face. Almost time. Underfoot he smothered the smoke he’d chucked onto the ground, spun his body then walked to the now-tumescent corpse of Harpenden. He screwfaced at the humming stench of rot as he stooped, took hold of the corpse beneath its horrible armpits and hoisted it upward. They dragged the stinking remnant beyond the property line, now only a series of post holes and a ring of darker sand, their noses wrinkled throughout. Gorgios had both Harpenden’s feet tucked under one of his armpits so that he could stretch his shirt collar up over his nose like a cut-price plague doctor. The smell was unseemly and unnatural, more even than the riddance of goodness by the sun and the flies; a supernatural odour oozed from the festering mass, waves of sinister vapour which exiled the want of scent from the nose and clouded the inner galleries with icons of grizzly death. 

Though Byron suffered Harpenden’s lump ridden armpits and had his hands swamped by the milksack flesh of his limp biceps, Gorgios’ job was worse; Harpenden’s leg wound was terribly infected. What blood the body retained spurted out chunky and black like chewed berries. Pus had dyed one trouserleg a different colour but Gorgios opted not to dwell on such things; he stared fixed ahead at a point he had chosen on his new friend Willy’s back and nothing, not even the cries of his mother, not even the threat of the loss of his playstation saves, would stir his fixation. Though they carried the body a very short distance, ten metres, perhaps fewer, it took them a long while. They dragged their feet as if through mud, and it was not solely due to their humble patron’s weight. 

Substances, perhaps ‘tis right to call them so, which in the living body are expelled into what nuns call a humble office, are in dead persons observed to expulse unbidden. The body as it loses blood and tensile strength evacuates. What sealant confines the bowel’s contents is excised and waste product, like a tsunami-high plague of rats through a paper sliding door’s taped corner, spills through and out ferociously. The Australian man’s fibreless diet was a mercy to his bearers, who only afterwards noted steaming brown balls that the wind was blowing around in the sand. 

“Here’s good.” Byron grunted.

Gorgios didn’t need telling twice, he instantly released his hold and let the mortising limbs chhhadunkt into the disturbed sand. He spat into cupped hands and rubbed the adhesive saliva around his palms, neck and face, any part which made direct contact with the unclean. His spit was sufficient for now but he would seek to ritually purify his carapace at the earliest possible juncture. He undid his wrist buttons and his cuffs flapping in the wind leant him a piratical air. He undid his shirt buttons bottom to top then wrestled off the garment. Shirtless he gleamed like mithril. He spat continually onto the ground, ridding himself of badness one gozzy at a time.

Byron bent his knees and gently laid down the head of the man he had killed. His resting neck disturbed a minor ridge four close dunelings had formed. His hands scooped behind the corpse’s head, their locking eyes found no common ground. One last look at the man who he could not, even now, call his enemy. As if his mind had been read, the missing portion of his ear stung like three wasps and his shoulders raised as if to repel phantom stingers, compel them to less sensitive targets, but when he saw that nothing visible had provoked this reaction, he wondered had it been Harpenden’s ghost stealing meagre revenge from beyond the veil. 

There were dirty jobs that had to be done. God made tough, mean bastards to do them. Not every bad attitude fucker is devilborn; anyone who tells you that they are is devilkin themselves. A job dirty even among midden-dwellers and squalid hoarders, yet it had to be done and done right. Byron wanted so much first to be sick and second to be unconscious, but he held himself against the flood of his body’s nonconsent, kept it all down. 

Herakles attained immortality through completion of difficult labours. However, a hero’s life isn’t all ‘hey you there, spin this pelt into a hooded cloak’; even the world’s strongest man sometimes had to muck out horrible dirty stables. That day, this labour belonged to Cobalt Byron and Gorgios the barman.

Byron rose from haunches when Stefanos’ jeep squealed around the corner, as much in want of grease (in Greece) as Talos. The waiter, who Byron could see had changed into casual clothing, arrived exactly on time and drove to exactly the scheduled spot; Byron noted him as a rum chap, reliable in a military situation. He breathed relief. He was that much closer to his room and bed now, but he hadn’t the energy to muster a full smile. 

He knew it wasn’t the right time to be thinking about it, like when you’ve a boner during the removal of nan’s remains, but he suddenly found his absent mind poking about the Irish mythological cycle. They’d one, he remembered, about a brown bull, and there were loads of bits about important magical bulls, cattle raiding (cattle were currency, think bank heist, break-in at the Mint), all of this stuff. These days, people honed in on bovine aspects, convinced there are vedic motifs in our myths and elements in our old language. However, Cobalt Byron wondered whether the people who lived at Minos before the first Greek apocalypse were the same culture who brought bull veneration to Ireland. Of course, in historical terms, these myths were not transcribed until relatively recently, but academic consensus approved the profound pre-christian origin of their tropes. Bullshit. Bullshit was the answer. Perhaps if archaeologists could find a petrified specimen of an ancient Irish bull pooh, they could test its genetic provenance for indicators of Grecian antecedents. If he ever made it off this island, where Jason the Minyan and his men had disembarked to engage in the pleasures that free women confer upon the handsome, he would look into that. Very heaven to be young, in thrall beneath the dreamscribe’s glowing sickle, the finger-to-lips moon. Waves broke against their naked bodies, crashed and climbed their wound thighs, filled the scant voids between bodies, all night until the sun rose gold as the fleece they sought. 

Herakles often boasted of needing two horses, owing to his vast testicular dimensions. Despite this, he never left the Argo, neither to feast nor couple with desirous Lemnian women. For his heart was kept by a beautiful boy, who didn’t care a minnow for the Giant’s feelings, and who valued the heart he held at very little. Not known for wit, prey to the bait of base passions, and too lovedrunk for reality, Hercules saw only his own love reflected back at him, boundless and strong as the kick of a Diomedan mare. Later he would depart that heroes roster, that role call of gods’ sons that made up the crew of the Argo. Suffocated by overabundance of love his beloved Hylas fled and Herakles swore to track, catch and chain him in golden fastens, then festoon him with bruising kisses forevermore. The crew feared he would accuse them of aiding Hylas’ escape but he stormed away. When Herakles departed the eyeline of their furthest-sighted man, the crew sighed relief; they had feared for their lives, having heard tales of the strongman’s maudlin. Herakles had, like Cu Chulainn, a warp spasm. A second, more violent form; a hysterical surreal version of himself like a drawing done all outside the lines. Hideous yet still himself with wit and agency, this form wreaked terrible battle. A havoc-self which lay dormant inside his body until invoked, perhaps through ingestion of an hallucinogenic substance, the mythic Soma.

It was then when, talking more candidly on the moored boat, three admitted that they had found Hylas’ body floating on the water that morning, hours before anything was suspected. They feared telling Herakles, in case it would remind him of his family’s fates. After fishing blue-skinned Hylas out from the water and checking that he had not sustained any visible injuries, they lifted him leg and a duck and chucked him into an unmarked grave. Around his hurried resting place with barely a clod askew to mark him, the gravediggers rubbed their faces with soot so that ghosts from Hades would not assail them. 

On a megrim, Cobalt brought the chords together, compared them, found neither wanting, bound them fast; his theories met and gnosis came to him, slowly like a mean old cat warming to you. Herakles, the Minoans, Cu Chulainn, the warp spasm, the bulls and the Táin, that was all the same or similar was it? Did it matter? Who built the round towers? If you were going to build something to defend yourself, surely now that’d be the worst possible structure you could build? No, you’ll say, they were bell towers and only adopted defensive functions centuries later. Cobalt thinks the same logic gets you to a truer truth; that they are older indeed than bells and monks and tonsures and the mystic austerity of the western atlantic shoulder. They were raised to unknown purposes in the dark ages before Christ, when war priests had metal-sounding names plucked right off the pages of White Dwarf. Nemed. Partholon. Dian Cecht. Ogma. Balor. Names that wouldn’t be out of place in Mordor. Farmers agree that land on which round towers, and other megalithic monuments are situated yields greater crop, rears healthier animals and bears healthier grasses. 

By now, Stefanos had alighted his jeep and stood before Byron awaiting instruction. Byron was down on one knee, his head lowered so that his non-shot ear rested against the raised thigh. He barely sustained himself and hadn’t made eye contact the last few times he’d spoken, to no one in particular. Inside his mind, Byron knew exactly what needed to be done but he hadn’t the gas to execute. The sheer mental strain of what he had endured overrode the physical taxations, though his stinging ear was a steep enough tithe. 

He had perhaps ten things to do, most of them physical movements, and had only energy for, at best, two things. He considered how best to deploy his resources, his Mars in Gemini (Alexander the Great had this). He planned to stand, concisely convey his intentions, then allow himself to fall unconscious in the comfort of his comrades’ competence. He stood, screamed the word sand in a high pitched voice and collapsed in a twitching heap, like some foagie jitterbugging on the care home floor to prove he doesn’t need hips replacing.