Heroes and Villains (18 page)

‘Be that as it may, you should show respect for him, not scrap with him like kids.’

Around them, children, rested and fed, began to play a small game, running about in a flush of refreshed spirits. Donally’s son, for a wonder released from his chain, wandered up to them and looked curiously at Jewel flat on the ground.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ he asked Mrs Green.

Jewel caught the boy’s ankle with one hand and overturned him so he sprawled and began to bellow.

‘He’s cussed,’ said Johnny, removing his soaked shirt to reveal a marvellous, lithe, muscular torso decorated with a bird in blue and red. He went off to find himself some fresh clothing. Jewel propped himself on one elbow and watched the half-witted boy do his weeping for him. Then he took a ring with a red stone off his third finger and offered it to the boy on the palm of his hand.

‘For me?’ demanded the half-wit, stopping crying at once.

‘Why not? Don’t eat it, mind.’

‘You must think I’m pretty stupid,’ said the boy. He held the ring to the light and the stone flashed the deepest red. He put it on his finger and admired his hand. Then lost interest.

‘Can I have some bread as well?’

‘Give him some bread.’ The right side of Jewel’s face was already beginning to discolour. The boy received a crust and scampered off. Jewel turned back to his foster-mother.

‘What’s wrong with Annie’s baby?’

She shrugged and did not reply except to make the sign against the evil eye which Marianne had never seen her do before. Then the journey continued. In the middle of the afternoon, Marianne arrived at the top of a hill and found she could see for miles across a melancholy terrain of deep gulfs, pools, abysses, pits, quagmires, dikes and fens divided by long stretches of thick woodland. They had reached a region where the hedgerows were composed solely of those plants with cutting leaves whose fruits were globes of poison. The riders cuffed the heads of their inquisitive mounts away from the sides of the road but the plants grew in the roadway, also, and cruelly cut open bare feet and also the legs and underparts of the horses. And once more it began to rain. She wondered whether the horses would one day become amphibious if they continued to spend so much time in the wet.

They camped in a discarded village. Mrs Green had a cottage with enough roof left to keep out the rain and she smuggled Annie and the sick baby in with her, so it would be sheltered and warm and the Doctor would not see it and order it out. The cottage had two rooms, one of them with a useable fireplace, once the birds’ nests had been cleared from the chimney. There were two human skeletons in the wreckage of a bed in the other room. The sheets had rotted away. The brothers removed all this without speaking. They chopped what remained of the furniture for firewood but left the rags at the broken windows.

‘You sleep by the fire with Mrs Green and Annie,’ said Jewel to Marianne. Annie was the first Barbarian woman she had encountered, Jewel’s cousin they met gathering mushrooms. She held her six months’ baby in her arms and stared dumbly at Marianne as if Marianne were to blame. The baby’s father had died of tetanus the previous spring; now she had only her baby.

‘I’ll sleep with you,’ Marianne affirmed obstinately.

Mrs Green cooked a meagre stew. After they had eaten, the other five men vanished to play the game with bones and to drink in another
cottage but Jewel stayed with the women, squatting on his haunches beside the fire, for there was still ill-feeling between him and Johnny. From time to time, he coughed. The stone-flagged floor had a thick, soft carpet of dust, criss-crossed in herring-bone patterns by the feet of mice. Mrs Green put the cooking pots and the dishes from which they had eaten out to wash clean in the rain. Annie sat on the edge of a mattress and cradled her baby in a blanket in her arms.

‘Pity the poor folks out in the cold tonight without a roof over their heads,’ said Mrs Green comfortably.

Jewel spread his fingers over his bruised face and said nothing. Mrs Green sat beside Annie and took her hand. Marianne knelt beside the fire; rain tumbled down the chimney and buzzed upon the flames. A perfect stillness descended upon them. They all sat so perfectly without movement it was as if the night supported itself upon the pillars of their stillness and nobody dared move. This stillness at last began to affect Marianne curiously; she had a great desire to laugh. Instead, she spoke quite softly, so as to disturb nothing.

‘Give me your comb,’ she said to Jewel. ‘I’ll comb your hair for you.’

He lowered his hand and revealed red eyes surprised and wary but soon she held him on her lap, combing out his hair in a prolonged, artificial caress. The eyes of the other two women followed the strokes of her hand as if mesmerized. And Marianne knew in her heart that none of this was real; that it was a kind of enchantment. She was in no-man’s-land. She watched her arm rise and fall, so newly gaudy a sleeve, and saw no shadow imaging the movements of her arm, so she knew herself to be dreaming and was all at once immensely relieved, so relieved she allowed herself a small ripple of unforgivable laughter. At that, the pillars collapsed and night tumbled into the room. The baby shrieked like an uprooted mandrake. Annie began to shriek, also. A stream of incoherent cries gushed from her mouth and Jewel took the comb from Marianne’s hand and sat upright.

‘She says you’re laughing at her,’ he interpreted. ‘She says you’re killing her baby by laughing at her. What are you going to do about it?’

Marianne stared unbelievingly at the woman who had lost all restraint and foamed and moaned upon the mattress whether she was real or not.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know at all. Tell me what to do.’

‘Kiss her,’ said Jewel and spat into the fire.

‘She hates me.’

‘Kiss her. Show her you’re made of flesh and blood.’

‘What do you mean, do you mean show her pity?’

‘Fuck off,’ he said and winced.

He pierced her with the sharp, hard, assessing gaze she had seen on his face the morning after they were married. She realized that all were now regarding her with this same, torturing, adamantine intensity and she stood up, perplexed and irritated. The baby’s screams modulated to a dull moaning.

Marianne reached out uncertainly, for she did not know how to approach a woman worn to such strange shapes by hardship and fear. Also, she thought Annie might have a knife in the waistband of her skirt and stab her when she came near enough. Then she thought she might catch an infection off the baby and die herself. Besides, she did not want to admit the unknown woman’s suffering was real. She resented her husband passionately since he had invented another intolerable ordeal for her apparently on the spur of the moment. She turned to run into the other room, away from them all.

‘Kiss her,’ said Jewel for the third time, with such an undertone of menace she knew there was nothing for it. She started a slow walk as if to the scaffold, one foot before the other, running a gauntlet of eyes like blades. Annie drew one hand from the folds of her shawl and made the magic, protective sign.

‘Don’t do that,’ said Jewel and Annie stopped as if she were exactly his creature and would do anything he said. Her hand was crooked in mid-air and Marianne pressed her dry lips against it. She kissed the woman’s hand but knew that was not enough so she kissed her forehead and looked at Jewel to see if she should kiss her mouth. Jewel gave no indication as to what either of them should do now. Annie shrank away but she was as much afraid of Jewel’s displeasure as she was of Marianne and he had perversely ceased to give her signals. Marianne saw the baby’s bleared, red face pressed against a breast from which it was too ill to suck and helplessly she began to cry. Her tears splashed on Annie’s cheek. Annie touched them with her finger and then licked her finger
to see if they were salt enough. Marianne slid down to her knees, sobbing as if her heart was breaking. Annie pushed the girl away and turned her back on her with a sigh.

‘I’m sure she’s got nothing against you, really, Marianne, dear,’ said Mrs Green.

Marianne pressed her fists into her eyes but tears ran through the spaces between her knuckles.

‘Put her to bed,’ said Mrs Green.

Jewel lifted her up by the shoulders and transferred her to the other room. She was crying so much she could not see where she was going. He dumped her on the heap of blankets, and left her there while the rain dripped all around her, until she cried herself to sleep. She did not wake up when he came to bed himself but she woke much later, in the middle of the night, when Mrs Green came shaking him, for in sleep they had unconsciously tangled together for warmth and it was impossible for one to wake without the other.

‘Come and dig the grave,’ said Mrs Green without preliminaries. She shielded the flame of a little lamp with her hand so as not to wake the other brothers who now snored about them.

‘Burn him,’ said Jewel.

‘I refuse to burn a child on a domestic fire,’ said Mrs Green.

‘You are a woman of many refinements,’ said Jewel sombrely.

He rolled on to the floor. Still the rain came down.

‘Come on, Marianne, come see me at my work.’

Rainwater pooled on the rotten floorboards and, outside, the hoof-churned earth had turned to knee-high, liquid mud. Mrs Green silently handed Jewel a spade. Both their faces seemed made of seamed rock. The woman stood in the doorway. Annie held her child, which was wrapped in a clean pillowslip as there was no time to improvise a coffin. Enough of the firelight shone through the open door for Jewel to see what he was doing. No other lights showed in the houses and there was neither moon nor stars, only rain. Jewel’s white shirt grew dark with mud and Marianne could hardly see the outline of his body, though she could hear the succulent noise of the spade. Now and then it clinked on a stone.

‘Dig deep enough so the dogs won’t find him before morning,’ warned Mrs Green.

‘Ah, grant me some competence,’ he replied.

At last he said: ‘Deep enough.’

Annie ducked into the rain and handed the heavy pillowslip to him.

‘He’s only a little bit of a thing to go by hisself,’ she said in wonder. She crouched down in the mud at the edge of the hole and patted down the earth on top of him tenderly, as if making sure the baby was covered up well enough. They returned to the cottage soaked to the skin and plastered with mud. Mrs Green had taken in the black pot and boiled the water it contained: she washed Annie’s face and hands, took off her dirty clothes and persuaded her to lie down, rocking her in her arms till she slept. Jewel washed silently. Marianne could not cry any more; she sat propped vacantly against the wall.

‘It’s almost morning,’ he said and, kneeling before the fire, bent forward to dry his tangled hair, hiding a face which Marianne’s swollen eyes saw for one moment entirely blasted of life and pared to the appalling integrity of bare bone.

Where the ground was naturally moist were brakes of sedges, flags and rushes but, elsewhere, the road was fringed with thorn bushes hung with grey, green and russet lichen. In those places where a spring had forced its way through the concrete, the roadway flowed like a river. Sometimes a fall of earth or rock almost obliterated the way and often the boughs of forest trees locked over their heads so the road echoed like a whispering gallery. Some warmish, moist days succeeded the rain and the travellers were tormented by mosquitoes but, after that, a dry day proved worst of all for the mud turned to white dust which choked them and caked their eyes and nostrils while flies and gnats danced in poisonous attendance.

‘You need some cool, grey days for the travelling, ideally,’ said Mrs Green.

At night, they slept beneath skin tents or inside whatever buildings they found which could afford a little protection. Nothing was permanent nor was any one night in any way as the previous night had been; the day was absolutely devoted to perpetual motion and Marianne felt herself stretched out upon the road as if it were a rack. Boredom and exhaustion conspired to erode her formerly complacent idea of herself. She could find no logic to account for her presence nor for that of the people around her nor any familiar, sequential logic at all in this shifting world; for that consciousness of reason in which her own had ripened was now withering away and she might soon be prepared to accept, since it was coherent, whatever malign structure of the world with which the shaman who rode the donkey should one day choose to present her. She often thought of the baby who had been planted in the ground like a bitter seed which would not germinate but she could make
no sense of it and often wondered why she had cried so much that night.

Though the rest of the tribe had long since abandoned this pursuit, the Doctor continued to watch her. The cracked mirrors of his dark glasses revealed all manner of potentialities for Marianne, modes of being to which she might aspire just as soon as she threw away her reason as of no further use to her, since it scarcely helped her to construe the enigmas all about her. Whether in his black furs or his dark suit, Donally remained obscenely spry. His parti-coloured beard sang out two confident notes of artificial colour all day and, in the evenings, she could hear him play geometric melodies upon a flute, as he sat underneath a tree. She imaged his snake extending a no less colourful head than his own from the beribboned bars of its cage, to listen to the music; maybe even the blurred plastic flowers which clung to the bars would open again fresh perfumed petals at the powerful beauty of the sound. For he was an excellent musician.

The roads were arteries which no longer sprang from a heart. Once the cities were gone, the roads reverted to an older function; they were used for the most existential kind of travelling, that nomadic peregrination which is an end in itself, and the Barbarians preferred to avoid the cities altogether, or, if this proved impossible, to go through the outskirts by day. This distaste for the ruins did not spring from superstition since parties of armed horsemen often made forays into their depths, seeking what they could find; but the Out People had taken to the cities, living there in holes in the ground.