The Colours

The Curator is pleased to admit you for a fifteenth viewing.

You will come in out of the cold to the gate of a lone border fort given over to a watch that never stands down, all stone and powder and pipe-clay and stopped garrison-clocks and the colours cracking gold far above on the staff, where every soul who could not bear to be the man no column ever followed is brought up onto the wall at last, given the head of the command, and followed. There is a place waiting for you at the head of the column, a name already in the order-book and a whole dark regiment formed up below the wall on your word, and the keeping of the fort drawn close around you, and a command that has learned by heart the one voice it could not do without. One reminder, with our compliments: the way off is real, and this time it asks whether you can walk off the wall leading no column and followed by no one, ground the colours with no man at your back, and give one last order to no one, to an ending that is wholly your own.