Ancient Images (14 page)

    

    

    Two hours later she was in the midst of Norfolk, and reminding herself never to rely on the map. A road drawn almost taut on the page seemed in practice never to run straight for more than a few hundred yards. She ought to be in Cromer in plenty of time to catch Tommy Hoddle before the evening show, but she thought she had better do without lunch. When she found herself at the tail end of yet another cortege unwilling to overtake a slow-moving car, she shifted down a gear as soon as she saw an uncurved stretch of road ahead, and was past the four cars before any of them had started signaling.

    In her mirror she saw them trundle into a side road, and then she was alone. A doughy cloud half the size of the sky lowered itself over the horizon until the sky was clear above the fields. Although the landscape was flat, she could never see far ahead, because of the hedges that bordered the devious roads. Sometimes the roads named on signposts at junctions weren't the roads the map would have her believe they were. Once she reached Cromer she would make time to relax, she promised herself.

    She braked at curves, gathered speed, braked again. Fields of grain stirred beyond her open window. She glanced at the mirror in case the movement she'd glimpsed back at the last curve meant that someone intended to pass her, but the road was deserted, shivering with dust and heat beneath the glaring sky. She swung around another curve and looked to see what was coming up fast behind her. It must have been a trick of perspective, a shrub of the hedge appearing to leap onto the tarmac as the curve shrank in the mirror before disappearing from view.

    The hedge nearer the car was growing taller, throwing the noise of the engine back at her. The noise seemed so like a choked growling in the hedge that she braked in case the engine had developed a fault. She was glad when the hedge and the noise sank, and she was able to hear that nothing was wrong with the car. A breeze rushed through a swath of the grass of the field she was speeding past-either a breeze or an animal. The airstream of the car might be causing the restlessness in the grass: surely no wild animal would stay so close to a moving vehicle. She trod hard on the accelerator as the road continued straight. It must be the car that was disturbing the field, for the movements were still pacing her. She reached a long gradual curve along which the hedge reared high, and didn't brake at first. She came in sight of the next straight stretch, and jerked her foot off the accelerator. Where the road curved again, a police car was waiting.

    "Exactly what I needed," Sandy sighed. "Thanks so much." She would have more to say to her imagination if it had brought her trouble with the police. She was a hundred yards from the police car when it flashed its lights to halt her.

    As she pulled onto the verge, the driver climbed out and shut his door with a chunk like the stroke of an ax. His shoulders were so wide that they made her think of American football. She wondered if walking slowly was part of police training, intended to give their quarry a chance to quake. He pushed his peaked cap higher on his ruddy forehead that looked dwarfed by his shoulders, and glanced up from her number plate. "May I ask where you're going to?"

    "Cromer."

    He nodded as if he was weighing her answer. "Where from?"

    "Cambridge."

    "You're a bit lost then, aren't you?"

    "I shouldn't be surprised, the way you signpost your roads."

    She didn't mean him personally or even the police force, but his face drooped like a hound's. "Actually," she said, "I'm sure this will take me to Cromer."

    He tramped around her car and took hold of her door, resting the ball of his thumb on the groove into which her window had sunk. "I'd like to see your driving license."

    She imagined him playing hockey instead of football, in a girl's gym suit, and felt somewhat better as she opened her handbag. "I believe you'll find that's in order," she said, flicking through the transparent plastic pockets until she found the one that held her license.

    He scrutinized both sides of it, and made to hand the wallet back to her. As he did so, her staff identity card flipped up. He stared at it with such distaste that she had the absurd notion that the ubiquitous Stilwell had even managed to prejudice him. "I'd watch out if I were you," he said.

    She would have asked what for if she had thought he would tell her. He went back to his vehicle, walking slowly in the middle of the road, as if warning her not to overtake him. He'd made her so tense that when she passed the junction he must have been watching she neglected to read the sign. It was a minor road, surely no use to her, and besides, there was a signposted crossroads a few hundred yards ahead.

    A dull sound of engines had begun to weigh down the air. She thought it must be farm machinery, though she could see none in the fields. Now she could read the signpost, which confirmed that she was on a road to Cromer. Lights across the field that met one angle of the junction caught her eye, and she braked. Whatever was rumbling toward her from the southwest, it had a police escort.

    She stopped at the junction to watch for a minute. It was Enoch's Army, still roving England in search of a hospitable county. The decrepit vans and caravans and mobile homes crawled across the landscape slowly as a funeral, boxed in by police cars with blue lights throbbing on their roofs. Despite the police escort, the convoy seemed for a moment old as the land, a nomadic tribe without a time or place to call its own. Its time had-been the sixties, Sandy thought, and watching it wouldn't get her to Cromer. She started the car and shot across the junction, which was clear for hundreds of yards. She was just past the crossroads when a boy of about seven ran out of the long grass to her right and into the road, straight in front of her car.

    She slammed on the brakes. The car skidded across the tarmac, almost into the ditch the child had jumped over. As Sandy turned into the skid a woman in a kaftan ran out of the grass after the child. She made to leap the ditch, stumbled backward as she saw the car, slipped on the muddy verge and fell awkwardly at the edge of the field. When she tried to rise and then lay wincing, one hand on her ankle, Sandy parked the car on the opposite verge and went to her.

    She hadn't reached the woman when the boy flew at her, brandishing a jaggedly pointed stone he had picked up. Sandy was already shaking with the effects of the near miss, and the way the boy clearly felt he needed to defend his mother from her turned her cold all over. "I'm not going to hurt her," she assured him. "I want to help."

    The woman raised her face, which looked scrubbed thin and pink. Though her uneven hair was graying, she was about thirty years old. "Are you not from round here?" she said in a broad Lancashire accent.

    "No more than you are," Sandy said. "Would that matter?"

    "People don't like us going near their homes or their land."

    "Pretty unavoidable, I'd say."

    When the woman smiled gratefully at her, the boy dropped his stone in the ditch with a splash. Sandy helped the woman to her feet. She took two steps and moaned through clenched lips, and tottered against Sandy. "We ought to get you to a hospital," Sandy said.

    "No hospitals. They make us wait until they've dealt with anyone who's got a home address. We've herbs and a healer in the convoy."

    "Do you want to wait here for them, or shall I drive you back?"

    "I want to go back," the boy pleaded, and slapped the roof of Sandy's car. When Sandy supported his mother to the vehicle and let him into the back she saw he had left earthy handprints on the roof. He was the first small boy she'd met who smelled as grubby as he looked, and his mother seemed to have no use for deodorants either. Sandy turned the car and said, "What was he running away from?"

    "Arcturus? All he wanted was to go in a hedge because we've no toilet in the van, and the farmer let two dogs chase him."

    "What did the police do?"

    The boy hissed at the mention of the police, and the woman laughed curtly. "Looked the other way. They don't want to know about us except to try and destroy us because we might make people see there are other ways of living besides theirs. Enoch says anyone who wears a pointed hat must be a dunce or a clown. One lot of police down south smashed all Arcturus's toys while they were pretending to search the van for drugs. They remind me of his father.
He
used to like to smash our things until we left him and joined Enoch."

    "Enoch's our daddy now," Arcturus said.

    Sandy felt lightheaded with so much unexpected information. "The dogs didn't hurt you, I hope."

    "No, Enoch chased them off, but Arcturus didn't realize. And do you know, the farmer started shouting, 'Don't you hurt my dogs'? Enoch says that people caring more for animals than humans shows how we've lost touch with the old ways but can't do without them. Society wants us all to dress in hides and skins now, but it used to be the priests who put on skins so they could communicate with the animals they shared the land with."

    "Hmm," Sandy responded, playing safe. She was on the side road now, and the foremost police car flashed its headlights at her. As she pulled half off the tarmac and felt her left-hand wheels sink into the verge, she saw Enoch Hill marching at the head of the convoy, behind the police. She hadn't realized he was so big: six and a half feet tall at least, with a black beard that hung onto his chest, and hair that streamed as low on his back. He wore a vest and trousers that appeared to be woven of rope. Sandy found the sight of him so fascinating that at first she didn't notice that the police were gesturing her to make a U-turn. "I've brought an injured woman back to her van," she called. "She fell on the road."

    "I'll take her," Enoch said. His voice was so big that it crowded out any trace of where he came from. He strode around the police escort and waited, breathing like a bull. Sandy helped her passenger out of the car, and he lifted the woman in his arms. "Vaggie's driving your van. She can drive while Merl sees to your leg."

    "I'll walk with you in case there are any dogs about, shall I?" Sandy said to the boy, and his mother gave her a grateful look.

    The van was at the rear of the parade of some forty vehicles, which were still moving, herded by the police. Men with piratical earrings stared out, and children with straw braided in their hair. Sandy had to trot so as to keep up with Enoch. She felt as if she were being borne along by his energy and presence, the smell of sweat and rope, the veins that stood out on his leathery arms, his hair and beard gleaming like wire. "Thanks for looking after these two," he said. "Sorry to be pushing you, but this isn't the place for a stroll."

    "Absolutely," Sandy panted. "Have you far to go?"

    He turned his huge weathered head and stared keenly at her without breaking his stride. "As far as we have to until we find somewhere that needs to be fed and that won't make us its slaves."

    The woman in his arms nodded vigorously. "Feed the land and it will feed you."

    "Our way is to move on when the land wants to rest and dream, but the mass of men won't leave it alone. Man and the land used to respect each other, but now man pollutes the land, or he stakes his claim on it and then neglects it, or he cultivates it for food that will never feed anyone. There'll come a day when the earth demands more of man than it ever did when man knew what it wanted."

    Some of this made sense to Sandy, despite the phrasing. "Do you have somewhere in mind for yourselves?"

    "We found a place last week, but the people around it rose up against us," Enoch said. "Territory breeds violence."

    They had reached the woman's vehicle, a van painted with sunbursts around the headlamps, clouds on the sides. Immediately the woman who was driving halted to let her and the child climb in, the police car that was following began to blare its horn. "Lo and behold," Enoch said. "Everywhere is someone's territory where we aren't welcome."

    "There must be people who have some sympathy for you."

    "Find me them," Enoch challenged, and strode back alongside the convoy. "People hate us for showing them what's wrong with their lives, like being made to live where the state decrees, and living too close together, and being scared someone else will steal what they've got, and having their family come apart around them but not daring to work out a different kind of family life."

    Sandy wondered if the whole convoy used his words as the woman had. "Man is as savage as he ever was," Enoch was saying. "Violence used to be necessary, it used to be part of the relationship between man and the earth. Now it has lost its meaning it can only get worse."

    "It surely can't be that simple."

    "How can it mean anything when we know the Bomb can destroy the land and every one of us? What do you do?"

    He was asking what her profession was, she gathered, presumably to demonstrate that she couldn't refute his ideas. "I'm a film editor."

    He frowned at her, his hairy nostrils flaring. His frown felt like a change in the weather. "Then you're adding to the violence," he said sadly. "Making images of it doesn't take it out of people, not when you put it up in front of them in the dark like a god. That's just feeding the images and making them feed on themselves, and that gives them power. Soon they'll have nothing to do with humanity, they'll just be another power that gobbles up meaning and feeds people the opposite."

    "Come on, all films aren't violent."

    "All fiction is an act of violence." His words had almost the rhythm of a marching song. "It's all an act of revenge on the world by people who don't like it but haven't the strength to change it. It's a way of putting your own prejudices into other people's heads. Me and my folk, we've been made into a fiction, a scapegoat people think will carry away everything they hate if they can only get rid of us."