Heroes and Villains (6 page)

‘Did they ever teach you medicine?’

‘Only a little history and social theory.’

‘That won’t help my brother, then, who’s ill.’

‘What is he ill with?’

‘Gangrene.’

She remembered the festering wound on the shoulder of the Barbarian she had seen on the road on May Day; gangrene would have crept over him like ivy.

‘Probably be dead before we get back, anyway. My middle brother, that is. Or was. To be exact, my half-brother. All my brothers are half-brothers, see, owing to my father’s wives having this facility for dying in childbirth. Have you any brothers?’

‘I used to have one but the Barbarians killed him.’

‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ said Jewel philosophically, chewing on a stem of grass.

He talked like a half-educated man and this surprised her very much since she had thought the Barbarians possessed no education at all. He also possessed, in his curiously elegant if abrupt movements as much as in his speech, a quality her father had called irony, unusual among the Professors. But, all the same, she recognized it. Talking to her, he half turned away his face and watched her from the corners of his eyes as if assessing his effect on her, or perhaps he was afraid to let her out of his sight while he was also afraid to look at her too closely. Yet he seemed to find some desperate humour in his own suspicions for she was only a young girl.

‘What sicknesses do Barbarians get?’

‘Barbarian …’ he repeated lovingly, giving each syllable an equal weight so that the word lost all its meaning and became abstract. ‘We get fevers from bad water. Cancers, when you grow old, if not before, or if you grow old, that is. Tetanus if you cut yourself. And that withering of the blood, you know? When you dry up and blow away in a matter of weeks.’

‘Do Barbarians go mad?’

He darted her a glance of extreme curiosity.

‘You don’t usually get the time; you need a bit of leisure to go properly mad. Donally is mad, though. Not that I’ve got much to compare him with, but I think he’s a bit mad, taking all in all.’

‘Who is Donally?’

‘My tutor,’ he said. ‘Dr Donally. Not that he’d teach me to read.’

‘How extraordinary you should have a tutor.’

‘He appointed hisself, I didn’t want him. He came with a snake in a box when my father, poor old sod, was old and ill. And the Doctor came riding on a donkey and he had a baby with him, he wrapped it in a blanket and it did nothing but dribble. And he had cases of books and a whole lot of needles, for the tattooing. And colours, he brought with him, a whole lot of colours.’

‘Is he a big man, with a beard in red and purple?’

‘Where did you see him?’ he asked sharply.

‘In the forest. I was out by myself and saw your tribe ride by but I don’t think I saw you. I think I’d remember you. Though perhaps not.’

‘And I thought we went so secret and all.’

‘I was by myself, nobody knew where I was and I didn’t tell anybody. It was the day my father died and I saw your tribe. I felt so sorry for them, they were so tired. If I hadn’t seen them, so defenceless, I would have told my uncle I saw you hiding in the shed and my uncle would have shot you.’

She paused, to observe his reaction, and realized she was boring him. It was about noon. The sun was directly overhead and cast no shadows.

‘Come on, let’s get on.’

She did not look where she was going and trod on an adder basking on the warm stone; the adder stung her calf and slid off into the bracken as quick as variegated lightning. She felt a burning pain around the wound.

‘Yeah,’ said Jewel with deep satisfaction, as if he had expected this.

He made her lie down on the grass, took his sharp knife and cut the wound then put his mouth against it, sucked out the poison, spat and continued to suck. She clenched and unclenched her fists to feel the extraordinary sensation of his wet mouth against her skin and the pain was terrible. It was the most primitive kind of first-aid for snakebite and she was not at all sure it would do any good. He tore off the sleeve of his shirt and bound up her leg tightly.

‘Why don’t you cry when you’re hurt?’ he said.

‘I only cry out of sentiment,’ she said. Nothing half so painful had ever happened to her.

‘Lie still for a bit but then you’ll have to walk. Or else I could leave you.’ Although he was not superstitious, he was interested and perhaps relieved to see the blood on the blade of his knife.

‘Oh, no, you won’t leave me. Even if you have to carry me.’

‘There’s a change of tune, already. Lucky it was only an adder.
Viperus berus
,’ he added idly. The pain made her light-headed; she did not believe she had heard him give the snake its zoological name. ‘He’s a poisonous snake but others are more poisonous, though I understand this was not so before; and now it’s the cats, really, that are worst of all.’

‘I thought Barbarians had uses for cats.’

‘Who told you that one, about sewing cats inside women?’

‘My nurse. But she was a silly old woman.’

‘Cats and Out People are the worst, worse than wolves. Cats drop down from the boughs if you startle a den; they drop on your shoulders and rip you and rip your eyes, if they get the chance. My brother got his arm ripped. Then it festers. Some muck in their saliva, cats. They used to sit by firesides and purr, didn’t they, they was well known for that.’

‘All cats did that before the war,’ she said. ‘Now only Professor cats know their place. My nurse had a nice cat. It was black and all it did was catch mice and the occasional bird.’

‘You said she was a silly old woman; it was just biding its time.’

‘It was a house cat.’

‘Out People, however, have poison arrows, leprosy, pox and no sense of pride, which is terrible. How does your leg feel?’

‘Burning.’

‘Are you scared of dying?’

‘What, you mean generally?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘This minute.’

‘Not until you mentioned it. Then I felt a pang.’

‘Good, I got the venom out, then,’ he said, pleased. ‘It’s a bad symptom, it’s fatal, fear of death. And you’ve gone white, at that.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘Good. Otherwise you’ve have gone all the colours of the sunset and come up in blisters, too.’

The rest of the journey to the encampment had the quality of a hallucination; now not only her eyes deceived her but also her ears and sense of balance. Sometimes he would support her, sometimes leave her to seek out a path; they came to a wide clearing full of buttercups and he left her alone with the wind which blew in her face like dishevelled hair. The surface of the meadow was restless and glittered with the motion of the grass and Jewel walked through the painted buttercups like a palpable shadow. A crow turned white as it flew through the sunshine. She was in great pain. It seemed to her that sometimes he carried her but she may have been dreaming. He gave her some brown and white honeysuckle to smell, to distract her. Under the trees, they trod a labyrinth of light and shade.

‘Let me tell you a bit more about
Viperus berus
,’ he said or might have said. ‘The Doctor is a practical man and believes religion is a social necessity. We discuss this topic endlessly for I don’t believe in it at all but I always let him win in the end for he has his poison chest, see, and I’m cautious of his poisons. So he keeps
Viperus berus
in a box out of social necessity and now and then he persuades them all to worship it.’

‘Is it a phallic cult?’ she asked, or perhaps asked.

‘He hasn’t decided,’ replied Jewel, who now carried her in his arms. ‘Sometimes it’s phallic and sometimes it isn’t, depending on his mood.’

The next thing she knew, she was limping beside him, leaning heavily on his arm and the sun had moved across the sky so the beams came down with a sideways slant. She fixed her eyes above the leaves and the thousand repetitions of green forms around her, and saw the fine meshes that dapple the sky as if they were a kind of wire netting and all underneath in a huge enclosure.

‘And if you’ve got to worship something, why not the snake, which sloughs off its skin and turns up all fresh and ready for anything and can also form itself into a perfect circle by putting its tail in its mouth. And lives on air and soil. And carries poison in its mouth all the time, ready to defend itself. I’ve nothing against snakes, mind.’

‘I wish I could agree with you.’

‘Once bitten, twice shy,’ he said.

As her nurse said to her in the kitchen when she pulled the cat’s tail and the cat scratched her. Since it was a domestic cat, the scratch did not fester. She touched Jewel’s earring with her finger and made it jangle like a tinny peal of bells. They might have passed a charred circle where the Out People had lit a fire and might have passed a skeleton. Then she saw a woman in dun-coloured clothes gathering fungus. Jewel motioned Marianne to keep quiet and crept up on the woman from behind; she thought he might garotte the woman, whose scream re-echoed in the ragged rooftop of the trees, but Jewel was laughing. Dropping her mushrooms, the woman fell on her knees in front of Jewel, moaning.

‘Here, you didn’t think they’d really kill me, did you?’ he snapped at her crossly. ‘Think I’m dead, do you?’

He opened the woman’s screwed up eyes with his fingers and abruptly stuck his hand into her mouth.

‘Taste me. I’m real.’

The woman sucked his fingers greedily and began to laugh.

‘The Doctor is praying for your soul,’ she said. ‘When they came back without you, he said you were dead, like the others.’

Marianne found the woman’s speech far more clotted and impenetrable than Jewel’s; she seemed to swallow half her words before she spoke them. Jewel put his hands under the woman’s armpits, stood her on her feet and led her to Marianne. The woman wore the skull of a stoat on a plaited thong of leather round her neck and her bare feet had grown a thick, protective shell of horny skin. She wore baggy trousers, a shirt with some kind of feather embroidery on it and a waistcoat of fur; she was brown with dirt. Seeing Marianne, her eyes opened wide with fear.

‘This is the daughter of my father’s sister’s daughter,’ said Jewel. The woman’s eyes were open so wide Marianne could see a rim of white all round the irises. She hung back and would perhaps have run away if Jewel had not got such tight hold of her hand. She was ageless with travel and child-bearing.

‘This is a girl called Marianne, she’s the daughter of a Professor of History,’ said Jewel. ‘She knows which way time runs and came with me of her own free will. A snake bit her but she didn’t die, she walked on.’

His face and voice were equally inscrutable. The woman looked from Jewel to Marianne and received no comfort from either of them; Marianne was in too much pain and far too perverse to smile. Then the woman sank down again, shuddering, and made certain gestures of the hand Marianne had first seen when she was six years old and realized were intended to ward off the evil eye. Marianne wanted to tell the woman not to be so silly but was all at once too sick and dizzy.

‘Take my hand,’ she said to Jewel. ‘I’m fainting.’

He obeyed her.

‘Please get up,’ she said to the woman. ‘You make me so embarrassed.’

‘That’s a word we woodsmen don’t often hear,’ remarked Jewel. ‘Here, Annie, you heard her. Get up.’

He yawned, as if suddenly excessively bored. His cousin got up but she would not walk beside them; she loitered a few paces in the rear
and muttered, apparently, spells and incantations. The trees thinned out and the wood ended abruptly. Marianne smelled a sharp stench of excrement and horses and they arrived.

Before her, she saw a beautiful valley of lush pasturage around a wide river hemmed with flowering reeds. On the other bank of this river from the place where they left the wood there lay a house of a kind Marianne had never seen before, though she had seen enough photographs and engravings to identify portions of the house’s anatomy and give them their historical names. This house was a gigantic memory of rotten stone, a compilation of innumerable forgotten styles now given some green unity by the devouring web of creeper, fur of moss and fungoid growth of rot. Wholly abandoned to decay, baroque stonework of the late Jacobean period, Gothic turrets murmurous with birds and pathetic elegance of Palladian pillared façades weathered indiscriminately together towards irreducible rubble. The forest perched upon the tumbled roofs in the shapes of yellow and purple weeds rooted in the gapped tiles, besides a few small trees and bushes. The windows gaped or sprouted internal foliage, as if the forest were as well already camped inside, there gathering strength for a green eruption which would one day burst the walls sky high back to nature. A horse or two grazed upon a terrace built in some kind of florid English Renaissance style. Upon the balustrade of this terrace were many pocked and armless statues in robes, or nude and garlanded. These looked like the petrified survivors of a malign
fête champêtre
ended long ago, in catastrophe.

Underneath the terrace was a brilliant clump of rose trees, once a formal garden. All the roses were blossoming on tall, thorny trees which knotted together and shook down petals. Everywhere she looked were men, women, children and horses. A few half-naked children sat on the banks of the river and fished. Mangy dogs scavenged in an enormous midden of bones and liquid dung which spread out from the side of the house like a huge stain. They picked their way down the sides of the valley. A boy was breaking in a colt beside a pile of sticks. When he saw the three figures on the other side of the river, he let out a great whoop. The colt bucked and he fell off.

‘That’s my brother,’ said Jewel. ‘That’s the youngest. That’s the prettiest, he’s precious.’

A dam in his heart must have broken with relief and joy for she saw he was crying. The boy plunged through the waters, coming to meet him. The children dropped their fishing rods and some ran into the house to fetch their parents but others threw themselves into the water to cross the river straight away. It seemed the whole camp was coming to meet Jewel, leaving every task, running as fast as their feet could carry them but the youngest brother arrived first and embraced the eldest, kissing his mouth, cheek, and eyes.