The Marshal

The Marshal stood at his window, high above the streets, and looked out over the old city.

The rain slashed down outside, the drops glinting momentarily in the light the lamp behind the Marshal threw on the window. The Marshal’s shadow also fell on the rain, and through that dark patch in the centre of the window he looked out across the old city, with its narrow steep roofs and its old churches and mosques. The old city had been badly damaged in the Marshal’s various wars, but rebuilt each time. He had not visited it for years, although he saw it every day from his office window.

“Yes,” he murmured to himself, “it has been a long time.”

Slowly, he came closer to the panes until his breath began to cloud the pane. Absently, he wiped away the moisture with his hand and laid his forehead on the pane, looking down at the street far below. It felt to him as though he was looking down a vertical cliff. Cars drove along, their pale yellow headlights glittering on the wet streets. As they drove past the crossing, their headlights shone sometimes on the Marshal’s statue in the centre of the little grassy island. He hated that statue now, hated the pigeons that muted on it, and hated the tourists who photographed it religiously. He was glad he couldn’t see it. The rain came down harder than ever, dashing itself against the window.

“In the mountains,” he said to himself, “it will have stopped raining by now.”

He remembered the nights of his youth, in the old house with the thick stone walls and the thatched roof. When it rained exceptionally heavily the water came through the sodden thatch and his parents would put out buckets under the heaviest leaks. The inside of the house would grow muggy and humid and the world outside grey and dull, and it seemed the dreariest place in the world.

“But it was different in the spring,” said the old Marshal, going back to his chair. In the spring the grass grew and the fluffy cirrus painted the blue sky in faint white brush-strokes, and the white butterflies darted around the yellow wildflowers. In the spring the air was like wine.

“I should go back to the mountains again,” said the Marshal, closing his eyes. “It’s time. I’m tired of this city and of the grey pavements and of the salutes. I shall retire and go back to the mountains, and sit beside the stream and watch the red and blue and yellow dragonflies hover over the water. I shall listen to the sheep bleating and watch for the hawk on the wing. I should do this.”

Outside the window the rain came down, and over on the other side of the city, the river rose with swollen floodwaters, and people thanked the Marshal in their minds for having provided them with the means to find shelter. And in dungeons far below the old fort the Marshal’s enemies sat in their cells and cried out aloud in the torture chambers; and in his office the Marshal dreamt of spring and butterflies and bluebells and daffodils.

When the Marshal’s aides arrived to inform him of the next meeting, they could not rouse him. He had been dead for some time.