Greybeard (14 page)

“Is she well this morning?”

“Never mind about her. She’s tucked safe under the canopy of the cart. She won’t speak to strangers in the mornings.”

“Are we not going to see her?”

“No.” Over the cart, a tatty brown canvas was stretched, and tied with leather thongs back and front so that nobody could see within. The cockerel crowed from beneath it. Norsgrey had already gathered up his chickens. Greybeard wondered what of their own equipment might not be missing, seeing that the old fellow worked so quietly.

“I’ll open the door for you,” he said. Weary hinges creaked as he pushed the door forward. He stood there scratching his beard, taking in the frost-becalmed scene before him. His company stirred as cold air entered the barn. Isaac sat up and licked his sharp muzzle. Towin squinted at his defunct watch. The reindeer started forward and dragged the cart into the open.

“I’m cold and stiff. I’ll walk with you a minute or two to see you on your way,” Greybeard said, wrapping his blanket more tightly about him.

“As you will. I’d be glad of your company as long as you don’t talk too much. I like to make an early start when the frying’s not so bad. By midday, it makes such a noise you’d think the hedges were burning.”

“You still find roads you can travel?”

“Ah, lots of roads still open between necessary points. There’s more travelling being done again lately; people are getting restless. Why they can’t sit where they are and die off in peace, I don’t know.”

“This place you were telling us about last night...”

“I never said nothing last night; I was drunk.”

“Mockweagles, you called it. What sort of treatment did they give you when you were there?”

Norsgrey’s little eyes almost disappeared between folds of his fibrous red and mauve skin. He jerked his thumb into the bushes through which they were pushing their way. “They’re in there waiting for you, my bearded friend. You can hear them twittering and frying, can’t you? They get up earlier than us and they go to bed later than us, and they’ll get you in the end.”

“But not you?”

“I go and have this injection and these beads every hundred years...”

“So that’s what they give you... You get an injection as well as those things around your neck. You know what those beads are, don’t you? They’re vitamin pills.”

“I’m saying nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Any case, you mortals would do best to hold your tongues. Here’s the road, and I’m off.”

They had come out at a sort of crossroads, where their track crossed a road that still boasted traces of tarmac on its rutted surface. Norsgrey beat at his reindeer with a stick, goading it into a less dilatory walk.

He looked over his shoulder at Greybeard, his misty breath entangled with the bright hairs of his cheeks. “Tell you one thing — if you get to Swifford Fair, ask for Bunny Jingadangelow.”

“Who’s he?” Greybeard asked.

“I’m telling you, he’s the man you should ask for at Swifford Fair. Remember the name — Bunny Jingadangelow.”

Wrapped in his blanket, Greybeard stood looking at the disappearing cart. He thought the canvas at the back stirred, and that he glimpsed — no, perhaps it was not a hand but his imagination. He stood there until the winding track carried Norsgrey and his conveyance out of sight.

As he turned away, he saw in the bushes close by a broken-necked corpse pinned to a post. It had the cocky, grinning appearance achieved only by those successfully long dead. Its skull was patched with flesh like dead leaves. Thin though the corpse’s jacket was, its flesh had worn still thinner, had shrivelled and parted like moisture drying off a stretch of sand, leaving the bars of rib salt beneath.

“Left dead at the crossroads as a warning to wrongdoers... Like the Middle Ages...the old-aged Middle Ages...” Greybeard muttered to himself. The eye sockets stared back at him. He was overtaken less by disgust than by a pang of longing for the DOUCH(E) truck he had parted with years ago. How people had underestimated the worth of mechanical gadgetry! The urge to record was on him; someone should leave behind a summary of earth’s decline, if only for visiting archaeologists from other possible worlds. He trotted heavily back down the track towards the barn, saying to himself as he went, “Bunny Jingadangelow, Bunny Jingadangelow...”

Nightfall came that day to the sound of music. They could see the lights of Swifford across the low flood. They rowed through a section of the Thames that had burst its banks and spread over the adjoining land, making water plants of the vegetation. Soon there were other boats near them, and people calling to them; their accents were difficult to understand, as Norsgrey’s had been at first.

“Why don’t they speak English the way they used?” Charley asked angrily. “It makes everything so much harder.”

“P’raps it isn’t only the time that’s gone funny,” Towin suggested. “P’raps distances have gone wrong too. P’raps this is France or China, eh, Charley? I’d believe anything, I would.”

“More fool you,” Becky said.

They came to where a raised dike or levee had been built. Behind it were dwellings of various kinds, huts and stalls, most of them of a temporary nature. Here was a stone bridge built in imposing fashion, with a portly stone balustrade, some of which had tumbled away. Through its span they saw lanterns bobbing, and two men walked among a small herd of reindeer, tending them and seeing they were watered for the night.

“We shall have to guard the boats and the sheep,” Martha said, as they moored against the bridge. “We don’t know how trustworthy these people are. Jeff Pitt, stay with me while the others go to look about.”

“I suppose I’d better,” Pitt said. “At least we’ll be out of trouble here. Perhaps you and I might split a cold lamb cutlet between us while the others are gone.”

Greybeard touched his wife’s hand.

“I’ll see how much the sheep will fetch while I’m about it,” he said.

They smiled at each other and he stepped up the bank, into the activity of the fair, with Charley, Towin, and Becky following. The ground squelched beneath their feet; smoke rolled across it from the little fires that burned everywhere. A heartening savour of food being cooked hung in the air. By most of the fires were little knots of people and a smooth talker, a vendor offering something for sale, whether a variety of nuts or fruits — one slab-cheeked fellow offered a fruit whose name Greybeard recalled only with difficulty from another world: peaches — or watches or kettles or rejuvenation elixirs. The customers were handing over coin for their acquisitions. In Sparcot currency had almost disappeared; the community had been small enough for a simple exchange of work and goods to be effective.

“Oooh, it’s like being back in civilization again,” Towin said, rubbing his wife’s buttocks. “How do you like this, eh, missus? Better than cruising on the river, wouldn’t you say? Look, they’ve even got a pub! Let’s all get a drink and get our insides warm, wouldn’t you say?”

He produced a bayonet, hawked it to two dealers, set them bidding against each other, and handed over the blade in exchange for a handful of silver coin. Grinning at his own business acumen, Towin doled some of the money out to Charley and Greybeard.

“I’m only lending you this, mind. Tomorrow we’ll flog one of the sheep and you can repay me. Five percent’s my rate, lads.”

They pushed into the nearest liquor stall, a framework hut with wooden floor. Its name, Potsluck Tavern, stood above the door in curly letters. It was crowded with ancient men and women, while behind the bar a couple of massive gnarled men like diseased oaks presided over the bottles. As he sipped a mead, Greybeard listened to the conversation about him, insensibly letting his mood expand. He had never thought it would feel so good to hear money jingle in his pocket.

Impressions and images fluttered in on him. It seemed as if, in leaving Sparcot, they had indeed escaped from a concentration camp. Here the human world went on in a way it had not managed at Sparcot. It was fatally wounded perhaps; in another half-century it would be rolled up and put away; but till then there was business to be made, life to be transacted, the chill and heat of personality to be struck out. As the mead started its combustion in his blood, Greybeard rejoiced to see that here was humanity, rapped over the knuckles for its follies by Whatever-Gods-May-Be, but still totally unregenerate.

An aged couple sat close by him, both of them wearing ill-fitting false teeth that looked as if they had been hammered into place by the nearest blacksmith; Greybeard drank in the noisy backchat of their party. They were celebrating their wedding. The man’s previous wife had died a month before of bronchitis. His playful scurries at his new partner, all fingers under the table, all lopsided teeth above, had about it a smack of the Dance of Death, but the earthy optimism of it all went not ill with the mead.

“You aren’t from the town?” one of the knotty barmen asked Greybeard. His accents, like those of everyone else they met, were difficult to understand at first.

“I don’t know what town you mean,” Greybeard said.

“Why, from Ensham or Ainsham, up the road a mile. I took you for a stranger. We used to hold the fair there in the streets, where it was comfortable and dry, but last year they reckoned we brought the flu bugs with us, and they wouldn’t have us in this year. That’s why we’re camped here on the marsh, developing rheumatics. Now they walk down to us — no more than a matter of a mile it is, but a lot of them are so old and lazy they won’t come this far. That’s why business is so bad.”

Although he looked like a riven oak, he was a gentle enough man. He introduced himself as Pete Potsluck, and talked with Greybeard between servings.

Greybeard began to tell him about Sparcot; bored by the subject, Becky and Towin and Charley, the latter with Isaac in his arms, moved away and joined in conversation with the wedding party. Potsluck said he reckoned there were many communities like Sparcot buried in the wilderness. “Get a bad winter, such as we’ve not had for a year or two, and some of them will be wiped out entirely. That’ll be the eventual end of all of us, I suppose.”

“Is there fighting anywhere? Do you hear rumours of an invasion from Scotland?”

“They say the Scots are doing very well, in the Highlands anyhow. There was so few of them in the first place; down here, population was so high it took some years for plagues and famines to shake us down to a sort of workable minimum. The Scots probably dodged all that trouble. But why should they bother us? We’re all getting too long in the tooth for fighting.”

“There are some wild-looking sparks at this fair.”

Potsluck laughed. “I don’t deny that. Senile delinquents, I call them. Funny thing, without any youngsters to set the pace, the old ones get up to their tricks — as well as they’re able.”

“What has happened to people like Croucher, then?”

“Croucher? Oh, this Cowley bloke you mentioned! The dictator class are all dead and buried, and a good job too. No, it’s getting too late for that sort of strong-arm thing. I mean, you just find laws in the towns, but outside of them, there is no law.”

“I didn’t so much mean law as force.”

“Well now, you can’t have law without force, can you? There’s a level where force is bad, but when you get to the sort of level we are down to, force becomes strength, and then it’s a positive blessing.”

“You are probably right.”

“I’d have thought you would have known that. You look the kind who carries a bit of law about with him, with those big fists and that bushy great beard.”

Greybeard grinned. “I don’t know. It’s difficult to judge what one’s own character is in unprecedented times like ours.”

“You haven’t made up your mind about yourself? Perhaps that’s what’s keeping you looking so young.”

Changing the subject, Greybeard changed his drink, and got himself a big glass of fortified parsnip wine, buying one for Potsluck also. Behind him, the wedding party became tuneful, singing the ephemeral songs of a century back, which had oddly developed a power to stick — and to stick in the gullet, Greybeard thought — as they launched into

“ ‘If you were the only girl in the world,

And I were the only boy…’ ”

“It may come to that yet,” he said, half laughing, to Potsluck. “Have you seen any children around? I mean, are any being born in these parts?”

“They’ve got a freak show here. You want to go and look in at that,” Potsluck said. Sudden bleakness eclipsed his good humour, and he turned sharply away to arrange the bottles behind him. In a little while, as if feeling he had been discourteous, he turned back and began to talk on a new tack.

“I used to be a hairdresser, back before the Accident and until that blinking Coalition government closed my shop. Seems years ago now, but then so it is — long years, I mean. I was trained up in my trade by my dad, who had the shop before me; and I always used to say when we first heard about this radiation scare that as long as there were people around they’d still want their hair cut — as long as it didn’t all fall out, naturally. I still do a bit of cutting for the other travelling men. There are those that still care for their appearance, I’m glad to say.”

Greybeard did not speak. He recognized a man in the grip of reminiscence. Potsluck had lost some of his semi-rustic way of speech; with a genteel phrase like “those that still care for their appearance,” he revealed how he had slipped back half a century to that vanished world of toilet perquisites, hair creams, before- and after-shave lotions, and the disguising of odours and blemishes.