The Wall(22)

Some philosopher said that death is not an event in life. Maybe. It doesn’t feel like that in a fight. It feels very much the opposite: that death, yours or your opponent’s, is not just an event in life, but the entire point of life. The culmination and meaning of the journey.

I turned. Two of the attackers had come up behind me. A white-armband assessor was with them. I was officially dead. An eerie feeling, or mixture of feelings. I was annoyed, in the way you’re annoyed when you’re playing a game, and think you’re winning, but suddenly lose; I was a little proud, because I’d ‘killed’ three of them and it had taken six of them to ‘kill’ me, though it was that irritating kind of pride that you can’t express without sounding as if you’re boasting, and I knew without having to think about it that boasting about an event which had ended with me being ‘killed’ would quickly lead to teasing and to a new nickname like, I don’t know, Dead Boy; I was a tiny bit relieved, because the fight was over, the tiring bit of the shift was over, the worst had happened, I was done for the night.

The two attackers who had snuck up behind me now put their heads together with the one I’d been shooting at, and began debating what to do next: declare that they had got over the Wall and stop, or run to the next section, several hundred metres away, and join in the ongoing fight there. There was gunfire, but it was sporadic; it was hard to tell what was going on. I went over to the three ‘dead’ attackers, who were standing together. It was a rule of these exercises that the ‘dead’ couldn’t talk to the living, but there was no rule to say we couldn’t talk to each other.

‘Hi,’ said one. He broke a piece of chocolate off a bar and gave it to me. Chocolate was a real Defenders’ luxury, very hard to get if you were off the Wall, so this was an insider’s gesture, a peace offering.

‘Thanks. Didn’t see that one coming. You were hiding, yeah?’

I’d worked it out: the only way they could have done what they had done was if they’d been concealed on the ledge below the Wall and were waiting for us when we came on shift. Cheating, in other words, since they could never have made it to that spot any other way on a clear moonlit night. My section of the Wall had been swarmed: I found out later that thirty of them, arranged in five groups of six, had attacked five sections of Wall, and mine was one of them.

‘Yup.’

‘Well, if the assessors let you do it, it’s legit.’

‘Yeah, that’s what our Captain said.’

‘Done this before?’

‘Attack–defend? No. You?’

‘No. More fun than being on the Wall, I reckon.’

‘No shit.’

The two heroes who had shot me in the back had ended their colloquy and decided to go ‘over the Wall’, so the fight was officially over. The assessor told the wounded man he wasn’t fit enough to go with them, so he started jogging down the ramparts towards the fight in the near distance. The assessor went with him. The attackers and I turned and went off in the other direction, back towards the watchtower and the barracks. One of the men stepped forwards to shake my hand. I returned the gesture to the other, who turned out to be a woman. We all seemed somehow to be chums.

‘Where are you lot staying?’ I asked.

‘Two barracks along. Just round the river bend so you lot can’t see us.’

‘How are you getting back?’

‘Lorry. At the end of the exercise. Should be there any minute now.’

They gave me another piece of chocolate. About halfway back to the watchtower, I saw Hughes coming towards me. Of course: the Wall never goes unguarded. This exercise was meant to be realistic, so if the Wall had been breached, the new watch would have to come on. As he came closer it was clear that he was too tired to be angry about being woken in the middle of the night.

‘Sorry mate,’ I said as we passed each other.

‘Got any food? We were sent straight out, no time.’

I emptied my pockets. Hughes took what I had. The assessors would have said this was against the rules, but there were no assessors there, so what the hell.

‘You kill all this lot?’ he asked.

‘Three of them. The other two got me.’

‘No hard feelings,’ said one of the men I’d ‘killed’, smiling, his voice claggy from the chocolate he was eating. We carried on back to the watchtower. Their lorry was waiting, and we all shook hands again. ‘See you later,’ I said, which got a laugh, because if I did, it would likely be with me having swarmed over the Wall, and them lying in wait for me, another fight to the ‘death’. No hard feelings, the living and the dead, more in common than you might think; a tiny bit of luck here and there dividing them; taking turns to live, taking turns to die; all in the same boat. All the same really. Others, Defenders – what’s the difference? I couldn’t decide if this was the opposite of what it would be like to fight to the death, or a good preparation for it.





11




At the debriefing, I thought the Captain would give us a giant bollocking, but that didn’t happen. It turned out he’d been in on it all along. That explained why he hadn’t been there the night before, which I have to admit I had been wondering about. The two Captains had discussed this sneak attack and ours had agreed to allow the set-up. It was a way of testing our combat skills: not how well we’d catch Others sneaking up on the Wall, but how well we’d do in an all-out fight with a big group who’d got over and ambushed us.