A History Maker (5 page)

“I'm reading about folk who struggled to stop all that,” said Wat, “They were the greatest heroes.”

“Well, mibby, but it was the powerplants that stopped all that.”

For a while the only sounds were sparrows twittering on the bird table, infant shouts and splashes, a dull distant boom
from Oxcleuch where something metallic was being synthesized. Joe said, “How would you like to die, Wat, if not in a battle folk would replay for centuries?”

“By heart failure while weeding a cabbage patch.”

“Aye, only dafties despise gardening,” said Joe thoughtfully, “But soldiers like us have no patience for it.”

Wat pocketed his book and stood up.

“You're no fool, Joe,” he said, “You're also brave, honest and good-natured so you'll be our next general.”

“Me? General Joe of Ettrick? Why not General Wat?” said Joe grinning shyly, “You're our hero.”

“I'm moody — a Hamlet type — good for sudden sprints and useless in the long run. I'll go now.”

“Aye, a ride will help ye relax. Arrange one for me.”

Wat went down to the lawn, showed the larger of the little aunts his bandaged palms and said politely, “Lend me your hands Auntie Jean, these arenae much use.”

She jumped happily up and trotted beside him through an orchard with beehives under the trees. They entered a stable with a backdoor onto the common on the far side of the deer fence and went through it, collecting saddle, bridle, sugar lumps and whistle from the tackroom. On the common several horses grazed within sight of a water trough.

“I need an experienced old pony,” said Wat,

“Sophia will do.”

He blew three notes on the whistle. A sedate dapple grey with long mane and tail moved nearer without ceasing to crop grass.

“I know where you're going! I know where you're going!” shouted Auntie Jean excitedly. Wat threw the saddle onto the pony, offered it sugar and held the head while Jean's strong little hands slipped on the bridle and tightened buckles on that and the girths. Wat inspected the buckles, set foot in stirrup, thrust most of himself over the pony's back and with some groaning arrived upright in the saddle.

“I'll lead you!” shouted Jean skipping about,

“I'll lead you to all the randy aunties of Craig Douglas!”

“You willnae,” said Wat, “Give me those.”

With a pout of annoyance she handed up the reins. He gripped them clumsily with his thumbs and said, “You don't know where I'm
going, Jean. Clap her and goodbye.”

Jean turned the pony to face east and downhill and clapped her rump. Sophia, liking her rider, set off briskly although he turned her uphill and north.

By easy slopes he headed for Hawkshaw Rig but later turned right into a glen between that and Wardlaw, then crossed a fast-flowing burn and descended into woods behind Craig Douglas house, hoping to enter the grounds unseen. He failed. The backdoor in the deer fence banged open as he neared and four boys ran out, jostling for priority in helping him dismount and stable Sophia.

“If Jean clyped on me she's a sleekit wee bitch,” he told them. They said nothing. Leaving the stable for the garden he saw all the Craig Douglas children and adolescents standing to left and right of the path, staring. Even babies in the arms of older sisters were gazing at him in silent wonder. He paused and said, “When I last came here you were a lot noisier.” Nobody spoke.

“Have you no tale for me Annie?” he asked a tall girl with a humorous cast of features. She said faintly, “We're glad you've no come back like our uncles, Wat.”

He shrugged, went on to the house and found
a mother waiting on the veranda. A week before she had been pleasantly plump; now there were dark hollows under her cheekbones and red-rimmed eyes. He said gruffly, “You look twenty years older, Mirren.”

She said coldly, “You're the same as ever. Have you come to see your pals?”

He thought for a moment. The outer walls of the house and most of the inner ones were transparent just now. Only the dark-walled infirmary and the room of the woman he wanted to see allowed no glimpse of their interior. He sighed and nodded.

And followed the mother inside and across floors where only young women looked straight at him. Grannies, matrons and even a girl suckling an infant ignored him or looked away: this disturbed him far more than the silence of the youngsters outside. He was brought into the infirmary where five big translucent boxes lay, each containing what seemed pink fog with a complicated shadow inside. The mother pressed a stud. The infirmary darkened but the shadows became the well-lit bodies of young, naked, badly dismembered men, each with limbs and organs floating beside their torso and linked to it by threads like cobwebs. Only one body exhibited movement: eyes which slowly
blinked in time with a mouth opening and shutting like the mouth of a fish. The face had no intelligence in it. Wat abruptly turned his back on these things. The ceiling went clear and admitted sunlight again.

“You can mend them?” he asked in a voice shrill with unbelief.

“Mibby. Perhaps. It will take years but they're just lads.”

“Mirren, most of Charlie's head is gone.”

“He'll grow a new one if we can restore the heart. The new brain will have his character if not his memories.”

“Our memories
are
our character, Mirren.”

“Then the mother and sisters who love him will restore his memories, Wat Dryhope. We'll give him back all the good things the war sliced away, but
you
won't be one of them, Wattie! When he starts thinking again we'll only remind him of what's harmless!”

“You're so maddened by grief that you're blethering, Mirren. I know it's a cruel injustice that I'm almost unhurt and your lads are nearly dead, but I'm the man who argued for what would have saved them. They refused it. And have you forgot that bloody Daddy Jardine was born and bred in this house by Craig Douglas women? Our general's obstrapulous conceit wasnae nourished by the aunties of Dryhope.”
“No woman on earth nourished Jardine's conceit!” cried Mirren, “He got it in the Warrior house.
We
never scorned him for his wee-ness but other soldiers did until he showed he was spunkier than them and could take knocks without squealing. So they made him their pet, then elected him boss, and after that Craig Douglas never saw him again — except through the public eye — until two days back when the Red Cross gave us his remains with sixteen other corpses and the pieces you're feart to turn round and see. Women had no part in making a bloody hero of Jardine Craig Douglas. Yes, he fathered weans in half the houses along Yarrow but he only wanted women for one thing. Like all soldiers the only folk he really loved were men!”

Wat heard this with bowed head then said, “All true, Aunt Mirren, but women arenae wholly innocent of the war game. You don't take to fighting like we do — the world holds hardly a dozen tribes of professional Amazons — but many girls, aye, and many women are daft about soldiers. I'm a graceless brute so when I came home from the stars few women outside Dryhope house would look at me — not until I fought for Ettrick and showed some talent.”

“I cannae be fair to you, Wat,” the mother said drying her eyes, “Go to Nan.”

He walked swiftly to the other opaque-walled room, looking ceilingward to avoid eye-contact with anyone before reaching it. A teenage girl scampered out as he was about to enter, followed by another. He went in and shut the door by pulling across a heavy tapestry curtain. Then he faced the woman inside and said, “See me Nan! I'm a rare animal now, an Ettrick warrior with nothing obvious missing. But I cannae move my fingers and I feel nine tenths dead and as sexless as a neep. Do you still like Wat Dryhope?”

She smiled and beckoned.

Next morning she wakened Wat by prising his arms from around her and saying, “You neednae hold so tight, I won't run away.”

She slipped out of bed and pulled on a long loose shirt. He raised himself by an elbow to watch. Playing a keyboard invisible to him she made a clear round window in the wall before her and raised it until it framed a hawk perched on the top branch of a Scotch pine and the summit of Whitelaw against a pale sky. By light
from this Nan opened elegant boxes holding the materials of a meal and made breakfast.

She was nearly forty with short dark hair and a lively, clever face which appreciated everything she saw. While poaching an egg her frown of concentration left a small smile at the corners of the mouth, a humorous look which had been inherited by her daughters. Nearby was a loom where she wove rugs, door curtains, pillows with patterns that made this room different from any other, also the screen she used to design new patterns or play music. She had a talent for every worthwhile art, handling utensils with swift ease which soothed Wat's mind as much as her fingers had soothed the rest of him the night before. He said, “I want to stay with you, here, in this room, till all the seas run dry, my dear, and the rocks melt in the sun. Can I do it for a week or two?”

“War fatigue?” she said, looking hard at him.

“No. I'm afraid of news from Geneva.”

“Are you feart they'll disqualify the draw with Northumbria?”

“No.
I hope
they disqualify that draw. It will discourage suicidal heroics that have become the bane of honest warfare, especially in Scotland.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

“Did ye see our last battle?”

“Certainly not. No decent woman who's borne a son watches battles.”

Slowly, almost unwillingly, Wat told her that someone he knew had struck a blow which had the appearance of being foul and might be condemned as such.

“Who was that?” said Nan, looking at Wat more closely still.

“If Geneva condemns him you'll soon know,” said Wat drearily, “If it doesnae I'll try to forget about it. Let me stay here for a fortnight Nan.” She said firmly, “Not possible. An hour from now I become mother and I cannae mother a whole household with you waiting round to be served. Sit up.”

She placed a closed mug of coffee where his mouth could reach a tube sticking from the top, then she sat on the bedside with a plate on her lap and fed him slices of poached-egg-on-toast. She said, “Go to Annie's room — she's mad about you and has no responsibilities. Stay there as long as you like. It will teach her something. Craig Douglas needs more bairns now and
I
don't want to carry another.”

He groaned and said, “I think of Annie as a wee sister.”

“Aye, because you never look at her. Do it. Dick
Megget was her dad. The Meggets havenae fucked with Dryhopes for three generations, there's no fear of incest.”

He said wistfully, “With you, in this room, I feel better, more sure of myself than anywhere else in the world.”

“I doubt it. Annie says you looked bloody sure of yourself in that last battle. She plays it six times a day. She says you're magnificent. Why are you no magnificent with me?” He scowled. She said, “Cheer up! You were my favourite soldier long before the rest got chopped. I liked you most
because
you didnae act the big hero. Yet in battle you're better than others. Why?”

“Easy told,” said Wat drearily, “I'm usually clumsier than other men because I don't like life as much, so danger speeds this body without upsetting this brain. Most soldiers only enjoy battles when looking back on them — while fighting they're too excited to think so do it automatically. I think cooler and hit faster while fighting so I enjoy it at the time. Afterward the memory depresses me. I wish I had another talent.”

“I remember you six years ago as a queer lanky clever lad who wanted to seed the stars and got accepted for it. Were you useless there?”

“No, I could do the work but I hated the narrow
places in the satellites, hated that every gramme of air we breathed or green thing we looked on had been contrived by human skill. I didnae hate it all, of course. A good thing about satellites is their lack of nourishment for our kind of powerplant, so men and women earn their living room by working together as equals. The men have no time for warfare. They sometimes fight duels, but hardly ever to the death. Many couples live as husband and wife and think of earthmen as lazy lecherous belligerent primitives. I agreed with them but I couldnae stand the enclosed spaces they lived in. Anyway, for me the satellites were just stepping-stones to the universe where immortals are making new worlds — and I hated that universe most of all. I could hardly face the deserts of dead rock and frozen stoor between the domed craters. The stars are fearsome out there, white, steady, and intense. Look at any two of them and if, like me, you're cursed with good sight, you soon see a hundred between. Look hard at any two of those and the same thing happens no matter how close they seem. I lost all sense of darkness between them. It was not the vast darkness but the endless lights, the millions of starlights that made me feel less than a grain of stoor myself — I felt like zero. I trudged across one of these
deserts with Groombridge who was testing my fitness for immortality. He said immortality would madden me unless I had a good reason for it and the only good reason was in the grains of dirt under our boots, the millions of stars over our helmets. He said the silence of these spaces did not appal minds in the network conspiring to bring them to life, but generations of mortals would die and be forgotten before Mars, Venus and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn had the ground and air to support freely evolving plants and intelligences. This was why people who chose immortality must prepare to live almost completely in the future. The main difference between
neo-sapience
and
proto-sapience
(that is what immortals call themselves and us) is, that the longer neo-sapiences live the more they know of their future, the longer we live the more we know of our past. Groombridge said mortals cling harder to the past as they age, so our lives have a tragic sweetness neo-sapience lacks, a painful sweetness got from memories of lost childhood, lost love, lost friends, lost opportunities, lost beauty et cetera — lost
life
, in other words. He said, ‘Our rejuvenation treatment still retains an embarrassing wealth of early memories but in two or three centuries we'll overcome that. If
you become immortal, Mr. Dryhope, by your five thousandth year the first fifty will have been erased by more recent, more urgent, more useful experiences, most of them gained through a virtual keyboard and scanner or their future equivalent. By your five thousandth year it is possible — and by your five millionth inevitable — that you will work in another galaxy in a body whose form we cannot now predict. By then, of course, the planet of your origin, like a myriad other worlds you've helped reshape, will have ceased to be even a cipher in your calculations. Perhaps I repel you, Mr. Dryhope?' Yes, he scunnered me like a creature I once saw in an aquarium. It was harmless but I couldnae watch it because it breathed, ate and ejaculated through holes which, to my mind, were in the wrong places. From feeling zero he had made me feel minus, an absence with an ache inside. I had to return to things as bonny and temporary as you and those.”