Heroes and Villains (19 page)

‘But I used to go for endless rambles in the ruins beside my home and never saw anyone,’ she said to Jewel.

‘They must have thought you were an angel and fled you from fear. They think the Professor villages are the earthly paradise and full of terrible angels with fiery swords to keep them out.’

But they did not fear the Barbarians and the cavalcade of wagons was difficult to defend from attack, as Marianne was to discover.

She was on foot, to spare the horses. She had chosen to walk near the front of the line, that day, away from Mrs Green and her old saws. The brothers took it in shifts to search the surroundings for enemies of various kinds and, when Jewel’s shift was over, he came and walked beside Marianne, perhaps to keep an eye on her. When she glanced at
him, he looked as insubstantial as if cut from paper. From time to time, he coughed. They entered the margins of the ruins towards the end of a lowering, windless morning.

To the left, the ground fell away in rust-stained, thorny swampland; to the right, there rose above them a wall of scarified concrete pierced with holes through which could be seen a leathern sky that seemed to exude sweat. This wall marked the boundary of a cratered expanse of fallen towers like a mouthful of rotten teeth and a whirlpool of crows drearily circled above it, filling the humid air with their melancholy cawing. The light that morning was yellow and garish. Random patches of fog now and then obscured the view and hung motionless in many places above the swamp. The road was bad. The original surface had deeply cracked into huge, irregular segments and the jagged interstices stuck up into the air. In these crevices, such plants as love arid places sprouted amidst pebbles, bones and skulls. The carts rolled drunkenly and often baggage would spill from them, scattering all manner of household implements everywhere. A coop of chickens fell, broke open and emitted a squawking flock immediately pursued with cheerful cries which died away lifelessly for the place was ominous.

Marianne stared at the back of the woman in front of her, who led a skinny cow by the bridle. She did not know this woman’s name but soon she knew her back by heart. It was the back of a long skirt made of a dark grey blanket, and of a shirt embroidered with five pointed stars, the soles of two bare feet shod with horn which she only saw one at a time, and the back of a sleeveless coat of fringed leather down which hung two brown plaits trimmed with rags. And then she saw an arrow stuck and quivering in this back, in the middle of the leather jacket, between the plaits, an arrow tipped with red come out of the blue, from nowhere.

Everything changed immediately. The woman grunted and fell forward on her face. Her terrified cow took to its heels and foundered miserably in the bog. Jewel seized Marianne and, flinging her sideways from the road, half dragged and half carried her across the slithering ground as fresh arrows fell around them until he pushed her down behind a piece of wall, beside a clump of thorns, in a position of precarious safety.

She fell on her face in the mud and could see nothing but heard a burst of gunfire, a clatter of hooves, a crash as of falling masonry and some wailing. She guessed Jewel was firing a rifle but he was lying above her and she realized with some bewilderment he was protecting her with his body. She heard some quick and whizzing sounds – the air, parted by arrows. Yet all this happened so quickly her mind’s eye still held the single image, the shaft of the arrow in the leather jacket, the arrow quivering. Then she found herself battered by movement but half released, half still pressed against the wall; he seemed to be fighting with someone. She struggled away from the twining bodies and crouched under the thorn bush, wiping her eyes.

Yellowish fog had descended and cut them off entirely so she, Jewel and the thing with which he fought were all contained within a sightless and opaque bubble of air. It was the fourth time she had seen Jewel fighting and the third time she had seen him fighting for his life. His attacker this time was naked, but for a loincloth of animal skin, and covered with festering sores. His arms were very short because they lacked elbows and were unnaturally hinged too low down on a body curiously warped and out of true. His face was marked with a gigantic cicatrice and the nose had been omitted; his nostrils were twin pits between his eyes. His canine teeth had grown into fangs. He was armed with a knife. They splashed and sprawled in the mud until Jewel managed to knock this knife from the other’s hand; then Jewel began to cough and could fight no more, choking as he was in the grasp of a less tangible enemy.

The warped man caught Jewel’s abundant hair, pulled back his head and was about to bite him in the throat when Marianne stabbed him in the small of the back, in the region of the kidneys, with his own knife. He gurgled, oozed excrement and jerked back and forth. She stabbed him several times more, surprised to see how quickly the blood gushed out. Beneath this death agony, Jewel now lay helpless and Marianne blindly continued to hack away until the creature was no more than a piece of abused flesh which did not continue to move.

Jewel opened his eyes. A little blood dribbled from the corner of his own mouth. The obscene head lay on his shoulder. At length he gestured to Marianne to remove the corpse and, dropping her reeking blade, she did so. He got to his knees and examined the wounds she had made.

‘I’ll have to learn you to shoot,’ he said. ‘You haven’t half messed him up, haven’t you, you haven’t half butchered him.’

While they wallowed in the mud, the fog became suffused with light. Jewel laid the corpse on its back, took two rings from his fingers, closed the eyes and weighed the eyelids down. Marianne leaned against the broken wall, panting for breath. They were both thickly caked with various kinds of filth. The fog became quite white and blew away completely. Twenty yards or so away from them, they saw the road. The wall where the Out People had ambushed them was pocked with bullet holes and the Doctor prowled up and down among the slain, chanting prayers, for the fighting was over.

Those killed lay in undignified heaps. Amongst the Out People, the human form acquired fantastic shapes. One man had furled ears as pale, delicate and extensive as Arum lilies. Another was scaled all over, with webbed hands and feet. Few had the conventional complement of limbs or features and most bore marks of nameless diseases. Some were ludicrously attenuated, with arms and legs twice as long as those of natural men, but one was perfect in all things but a perfect miniature, scarcely two feet long from tip to tip.

‘There you are,’ said Jewel to his tutor. ‘The phenomenon of man.’

‘I don’t believe they’re men at all,’ said Marianne, who had killed the warped man out of blind repugnance only to obliterate what seemed to her a cruel parody of life.

‘Necessity suggests we adopt a standard pattern,’ said Donally. ‘We abhor variations, though it may be a short-sighted measure, at that, if we are to adapt to survive. Perhaps we should seriously reconsider as to whether form makes the man.’

Jewel thought for a while.

‘Those who live in marshes ought to grow web feet,’ he suggested and laughed so much the bereaved were startled.

The greater part of the cavalcade had escaped the attack, which had focused unwisely on the front of the line, and the Out People had been easily routed for they were by no means cunning. Their sinister arrows killed only the one woman, a child and an old man, though several others had been wounded and now stoically awaited blood poisoning. While the bodies were being disposed of, the carts went forward to leave
this dangerous place as soon as possible and men with guns crouched along the wall, to cover them.

Jewel, Blue, Bendigo and Jacob were all digging graves beside the road, a communal hole for the Out People but one each for the members of the tribe. Donally stood beside them, riffling through the Book of Common Prayer, and Marianne waited beside her husband, combing the dry mud out of her hair with her fingers. She felt neither shame nor horror, only a release from boredom and, with it, a certain sense of well-being. Since she had saved Jewel’s life again, she wondered whether it was indeed hers to dispose of in entirety. A rifle cracked and soon they tossed into the hole a being of indeterminate sex equipped with breasts, testicles and a light but total covering of chestnut fur. Then a horseman leaped from the ruins dragging a prisoner on the end of the rope, a prisoner who bounced and rebounded from the road like a stuffed skin but wept. It was Precious, all trussed up with ropes but for his feet.

‘Precious was supposed to search the wall,’ said Johnny. ‘That was his duty. Who can you trust if not your kin?’

‘Three people died,’ said Jewel wearily to Precious. ‘What have you to say to that?’

Precious was so frightened he could hardly stand upright.

‘I found some honey in a tree,’ he said. ‘I was eating honey.’

‘Honey,’ repeated Jewel. Their foster-mother lifted her skirts fastidiously out of the dirt and picked her way towards them.

‘He was eating honey and let the Out People through,’ said Jewel sullenly, gesturing towards Precious.

‘He’s only a kid,’ said Mrs Green. ‘He’s fifteen years old.’

‘Power is forced to display persuasive force,’ said Donally, folding his hands into his sleeves. Marianne saw his words as if in red paint written on the shattered wall.

‘You deserve to be hung,’ said Jewel to his brother. ‘But instead I shall have to whip you, as soon as I can find a tree to tie you to. And now you can dig.’

When this task was finished and Donally had performed a rite or two, they rode on. Mrs Green had Jewel’s black horse while he walked beside her. She was obviously suffering some sort of conflict.

‘It seems so hard,’ she said. ‘And he no more than a child.’

Nobody talked to Precious, who stumbled behind them, weeping.

‘No thanks to Precious we’re not all dead,’ said Jewel, on whose face the mud had dried into a mask.

‘Precious is half your own brother and some of your own flesh and blood.’

‘All the more reason it’s I who should whip him.’

As they reached the open country, they left the fog, the swamp and the lurid light behind them; an afternoon sun came out to shine and they came to a region of bracken covered downs. Precious was to be punished in the evening since then it would be most impressive. He lurched at Johnny’s heels with his hands tied together behind his back and received nothing to eat or drink all the rest of the day. As evening approached, they arrived at some farm buildings. The corrugated iron roof of the barn was a cobweb of dark red rust, tenuous as the wing of a moth, and it was no longer possible to tell where the fields had been, but an orchard had shed so many apples into the long grass that a herd of wild pigs had settled there to gorge themselves and trampled the foliage flat.

The wild pigs were long, pale animals with flapping pink ears and eyes like redcurrants. Their snouts quivered as they scrambled over one another to escape the first bullets of the outriders and they squealed and grunted dreadfully. The beautiful light of early evening turned them to pigs of gold. Those who did not instantly become pork raced off over the downs with a surprising turn of speed. The village of tents went up and fires were started. Johnny lashed Precious by the wrists to the low bough of an apple tree and left him there, to wait. The tribe gradually assembled round the apple tree and an air of anticipation lent unusual animation to each weathered face.

The Doctor unpacked and donned his wooden mask and feather robe. This rainbow giant stood like a polychrome abstraction beside the prisoner, a horsewhip in his hand. And Jewel’s face was clay; neither wore their proper faces for this occasion. Donally handed Jewel the whip and, taking off his shirt, Jewel went to the tree. Marianne saw the other apple tree, the one he carried with him, and this tattooed tree seemed to throb with life, as if it were the visible tree of the young man’s blood, the tree which sustained him, and no decorative pattern at all; she found she was breathless.

‘Justice,’ he said.

The children all sat together to watch; Jen, Donally’s son and the other ones sat hushed with expectation, the performance of justice might have been some long-promised treat. Annie watched with huge eyes and her mouth ajar; perhaps she would be comforted by the sight of Precious’ pain or saw his punishment as a retribution on some more impersonal object. The boy had already been hanging by his hands for some time. His face was turned inwards to the leafless core of the tree. In a ritual fashion, with a stately gesture, Donally ripped off his shirt, also. His feet trailed upon the ground. He had been sentenced to twenty lashes. After the second stroke, Donally’s son whimpered out loud, broke from the circle and ran away into the bracken.

After the fifth, a girl began to cry. At the eighth, Precious started to bleed profusely. Marianne could no longer bear to watch after the tenth stroke, when he was as striped as a bloody tiger and swung heavily under the blows like a carpet being beaten. The whip whirred and thumped; Precious grunted at its impact, all in all a mechanical repetition of sounds. She saw that Jewel had become mechanical.

He was nothing but the idea of that power which men fear to offend; his back flexed and his arm rose and fell. The snake on his back flicked its tongue in and out with the play of muscle beneath the skin and the tattooed Adam appeared to flinch again and again from the apple which Eve again and again leaned forward to offer him until it seemed that the moving picture of an endless temptation was projecting on Jewel’s surfaces, an uncompleted series of actions with no conclusion, caught in a groove of time. And Jewel was also caught in this groove of time; frozen in the act of punishment, he was concealed within a mask which covered his entire body, a man no longer. Had they used to put hoods over hangmen in the old days in case they caught sight of themselves in mirrors and died of fright? When the strokes ceased, she looked again. Jewel dropped the whip and ran to the tree. He cut Precious down and caught him in his arms as he fell forward.

‘It’s not my fault,’ said Jewel. ‘I love you best.’