He laughed and said, ‘What a state of affairs. He’s a tyrant, you know, Napoléon. This thanks he gives me, it means he’s leaving soon. It means the next battle is close. He’ll have his Danube crossing within days. Mark my words. I’ll send a boy over the river tonight to let Archduke Charles know.’

He glanced at Hauptmann Koestler, who nodded. It was already an order, already a plan.

‘Napoléon’s a tyrant,’ Uncle Drew said to me, ‘but you’re the wee lad who saw the tyrant as not beyond negotiation, and who piped up, and who won two chickens for his master as empires were falling. I’ll be telling your grandmother that, when such things are possible again.’

Pride hit my eyes like a rush of sparks, but I blinked them away, for it seemed like a less than manly show. My uncle opened his hand, as though he needed to check if the little men were still there.

‘I can’t keep these,’ he told me. ‘I can’t be rewarded by the enemy, even if it’s two bits of painted iron. I did what I did for Vienna, and can’t be seen to be thanked by the city’s conqueror simply because my actions have convenienced him. You need to take these, and dispose of them safely.’

He closed his hand over the little men again, then reached across and dropped them in mine. I slipped them into a coat pocket, and we rode together to the city gates.

I have them in my room as I write, set on the window ledge, side by side, with the garden behind them, even more cherry blossom in bloom today. In his right hand, Napoléon holds a telescope; in his left, behind his back, he holds a map that is marked up for battle. I am sure it is Austerlitz, their first meeting. My uncle is dressed for the second, for the surrender of Vienna; his head bare, his simplest sword in its sheath, the Knight’s Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa on his chest.

2019

Hong Kong

Poking out from the top of Simon’s low-cut running sock there’s a purple scar, like a half-drawn smile. They took the vein endoscopically. He’d have a seam running the length of his leg otherwise, apparently. There’s another scar tucked on the inside of his knee.

‘Are you right with the steps?’ he says to me. He’s stopped to point them out, and turned in a way that puts his scars on show. Those two, anyway.

There are maybe twenty steps on the path ahead of us. They follow the contours, so they’re irregular, rocks concreted into a sequence of step-like shapes, greening with lichen.