Heroes and Villains (21 page)

‘Something’s got into you, anyway,’ he said. ‘You’ve gone out of your mind.’

‘I’m sick.’

‘Sick?’

‘He’s right, I know it.’

‘And is it mine?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘There’s no “of course” about it. You go sneaking off and who can tell who tumbles you, you randy bitch.’

‘I don’t want it. I don’t want to stay here.’

‘Stop slobbering over my hands.’

‘And I’m sick …’

‘If you stop slobbering over my hands, I’ll be kind to you for a while.’

He picked her up; she climbed inside his jacket as much as she could and would have climbed inside his breast to vanish there if such a thing had been possible. Her nostrils were full of wood smoke, the rank richness of horses and the disturbing odour of imperfectly cured animal hide, all of which combined in Jewel’s peculiar perfume, but when she looked upwards towards his face, she saw no palpable structure, only a series of hallucinations. Face of a painted devil. Then a cruel, hieratic carving of brown wood and shadow. Then a moving darkness folded, perhaps, in sorrow. But each image was projected successively not on the real face of a living man but against or in opposition to the spare outline of features now traced as with fearful needles on the inside of her brain.

‘Who do you see when you see me?’ she asked him, burying her own face in his bosom.

‘Do you want the truth?’

She nodded.

‘The firing squad.’

‘That’s not the whole truth. Try again.’

‘Insatiability,’ he said with some bitterness.

‘That’s oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,’ she insisted. ‘One more time.’

He was silent for several minutes.

‘The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.’

‘Now you’re being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?’

He appeared to smile and asked if she were feeling better.

‘I am terrified,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been so terrified in my whole life.’

‘It’s not that you’re very old,’ he pointed out. ‘Stand up.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Lie down, then.’

He found some blankets and made her a bed inside the cart, with her head upon a bale of skins. He continued to hold her, however, though abstractedly, and she kissed his throat again and again, reaching under his shirt. He grunted and, not ungently, took away her hand. He was now sunk in thought. She examined his necklaces closely and soon all her attention was concentrated on them. The St Christopher medallion; a string of clear glass beads like eyes of blue; the teeth of a number of wild animals hanging from a strip of leather; three loops of moony pearls which gleamed in the dark; a garland of leaves of gold beaten extremely thin, a beautiful and ancient looking piece.

‘I want a necklace,’ she said. ‘I want your string of beads.’

‘Then want must be your master. I’m not giving away my charms and talismans, what would become of me without them?’

It was the necklace of leaves she wanted, such golden leaves as might have grown in Eden itself. As she hung round his neck, herself another necklace, some creakings heralded a visitor to the cart. Donally’s shadow fell across them. He held a candle lantern in his hand and carried a flask. The candle was faintly scented with vanilla, a smell at once exotic and domestic.

‘A drink,’ he said, setting down the fragrant lantern and offering the flask.

‘After you,’ said Jewel, exercising his usual caution. His tutor drank and Jewel took the flask. Donally clambered in beside them, causing the cart to sway and rock; he cleared a space for himself and settled down uninvited. They were all three so close together they could hear one another breathing. The camp was now in the silence of sleep. Jewel drank and put the mouth of the flask between Marianne’s lips.

‘Do you good.’

She swallowed a mouthful of the crude liquor and wound around him more closely than before. He covered up her thighs with a fold of blanket.

‘Fatherhood,’ said the Doctor warmly, introducing the subject without further ado. ‘How will you accept the role of father?’

‘Complacently.’

‘And how shall she cope with that of mother?’

‘Only most reluctantly, I should think. Look at her, she’s a changed woman; but who knows how long it will last.’

She was half-deafened by the banging of Jewel’s heart and far too unhappy to attend to the two men who started to converse above her head in voices which hardly seemed connected with the mouths from which they issued. She kissed her husband’s wrist or throat now and then and he absently patted her head as if she were now one of the family and drowsed on his knee like Jen when she was too sleepy to go to bed.

‘She says it’s my kid. Do you believe her? I guess I’ll have to accept the role of father, anyway.’

‘I’d believe her, yes. Your brothers wouldn’t dare, in fear of whip and noose since you married her, and my son never approached her before today.’

‘And him only thirteen years old!’ said Jewel in admiration.

‘I shall have to keep him chained up all the time, now,’ brooded Donally. ‘Or else he’ll scatter his semen through the tribe like infected dew. I beat him severely when he told me and chained him to a tree. At the moment, he’s too affronted to howl.’

‘She’s really done for, then,’ said Jewel, grinning. ‘I’ve really done for her, now.’

‘Don’t rest on your laurels.’

‘What, should I still beware the occult charge of her touch? Are you asleep, Marianne?’

‘She isn’t. Give her another drink.’

‘Doesn’t she look young. When I was about her age, I was perfectly innocent, do you remember?’

‘Perfectly. Were you scared when you went out raiding, that first time?’

‘Not at all. When I painted my face and so on, I became the frightening thing myself and ceased altogether to be anything but the thing I was, an implement for killing people.’

‘And she watched you.’

‘She converted me into something else by seeing me. Whenever I think of her, when I’m away from her, I always imagine her to be wearing long, black gloves up to her elbows, riding behind me on the saddle, biding her time till the fatal moment.’

‘What does the future hold for your child?’

‘What does the future hold for yours? Why don’t you kill him now, instead of dragging it out?’

Marianne bit his hand. He put his mouth against her ear and said: ‘Don’t push your luck.’

‘What does the future hold for your child if you won’t accept your responsibilities?’

‘What’s that?’ demanded Jewel, astonished.

‘Would you have punished Precious of your own free will?’

‘No.’

‘Would you have married her of your own free will?’

‘No.’

‘Would you create a power structure of your own free will?’

‘No.’

‘Then how can you hope to be Moses when you won’t acknowledge a chosen people?’

‘I don’t want to be no Moses. And the future is a dream.’

‘Hope,’ proposed Donally.

‘Hope,’ repeated Jewel. He contemplated the rings on his fingers for a long time. Then he said:

‘Perhaps I should ask her to take me to the Professors, who at least make the pretence of nourishing such a thing. I would resign the tribe to you to do as you pleased with, Doctor, and ride away to the Professors with Marianne as if she were a white flag. Perhaps now is the time to capitulate.’

‘Wake her up and ask her what they’d do to you.’

Jewel shook Marianne but she was awake.

‘They’d shoot you on sight,’ she said.

‘What if I sent you first as an emissary, to tell them I was coming and gave myself up freely?’

‘They would put you in a cage so everyone could examine you. You’d be an icon of otherness, like a talking beast or a piece of meteorite.’

‘If the lion could speak, we would not understand it,’ said Donally.

‘What if I cunningly revealed my extreme intelligence and excellent though unorthodox education?’

‘The Barbarians are Yahoos but the Professors are Laputans,’ she
said. ‘And you haven’t been educated according to their requirements.’

‘Don’t equivocate, answer his question,’ said Donally.

‘They’d walk around you carefully in case you bit them and clip off your hair and take photographs of the picture on your back, a relic of the survival of Judaeo-Christian iconography, they’d find that very interesting. They’d take away your coat of fur and dress you in a dark suit and set you intelligence tests where you had to match squares with circles and circles with squares. And give you aptitude tests. And manual dexterity tests. And Rorschach blot tests. And introversion/extroversion tests. And blood tests. And many other tests. And everything you did or said would be observed and judged, sleeping and waking, everything, to see how you revealed your differences, every word and gesture studied and annotated until you were nothing but a mass of footnotes with a tiny trickle of text at the top of a page. You would be pressed inside a book. And you’d be lodged probably with psychologists and all the time you’d be a perfect stranger.’

And though all she said was true and would prove quite inimical to the hostile and aggressive sources of his mysterious beauty, still she felt nostalgic for peace and quiet, now she was so ill.

‘And you, would you come and visit me in my room or cage, to give me a little charity?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not if you were not this thing you are outside.’

‘Pass her the flask,’ said Donally, well pleased with her.

‘But I never really proposed to immolate myself among her people, not in reality,’ said Jewel, watching her drink. ‘Though what would I become if I made all those concessions for the sake of the child?’

‘What will become of you, anyway? You’ll get shot on some raid or else in some attack and your remarkable carcass slung into a pit taking my masterpieces with it, more’s the pity.’

‘Everywhere I go, I’m doomed to be nothing but an exhibit,’ said Jewel.

‘I am an intellectual myself, what else do you expect from intellectuals; we are accustomed to examine things and scarcely bother ourselves about the hurt feelings of the things we examine, why should we? She’s passing out.’

‘No, she’s still kissing me. Have a bit of dignity, girl, pull yourself
together. Embrace your destiny with style, that’s the important thing. Pretend you’re Eve at the end of the world.’

‘Lilith,’ said Donally, pedantically. ‘Call her Lilith.’

‘That’s a bad heredity. Besides, I always thought of Lilith as kind of mature.’

‘She’s a little Lilith.’

She said to Jewel: ‘You are so beautiful, I think you must be true.’

‘That’s a fallacy,’ snapped Donally.

‘But I think that, in the long run, I shall be forced to trust appearances. When I was a little girl, we played at heroes and villains but now I don’t know which is which any more, nor who is who, and what can I trust if not appearances? Because nobody can teach me which is which nor who is who because my father is dead.’

‘You’ll have to learn for yourself, then,’ said Jewel. ‘Don’t we all.’

‘Give me your son and I’ll turn him into the Tiger Boy.’

‘He wouldn’t survive it.’

‘I’ve perfected my technique since then, through the years; I wouldn’t harm him. Tattooing is the first of the post-apocalyptic arts, its materials are flesh and blood.’

He gave his lecture theatre cough but Jewel interrupted him.

‘It’s going to be a little girl, anyway. It’s going to be a small, black, spiteful little girl and I’ll cut my heart out for her to play with, if she wants it. Why did you try to poison her and me, that time? Was it another example of your diabolical artistry? Like when you killed my father?’

‘He was an old man who wanted to live for ever but he had a cancer. You don’t want to understand anything.’

‘Do something for me,’ said Jewel slowly.

‘Yes. All right,’ said Donally suspiciously.

‘Set your son free and throw away his chains.’

‘Why?’

‘To show me you didn’t mean to kill my father and you mixed up the drugs.’

‘How illogical,’ said Donally. He stood up, mounted on a box and urinated over the side of the cart. Then he resumed his position beside Jewel and slid his arm about him.

‘I regard you as my proper son.’

‘Did you become my father when you killed my father? What, did you eat him?’

‘I assumed responsibility for you.’

‘What, trying to kill me, too, on and off for ten years?’

‘I taught you all I knew.’

‘Caution, you certainly taught me caution. And genetics, metaphysics, some conjuring tricks and a few quotations from old books in dead languages.’

‘It’s not too late to learn from me. I’ll give you a future, if you’d only listen. I could make you so terrifying the bends of the road would straighten out with fright as you rode down. I’ll make you a politician and you could become the King of all the Yahoos and all the Professors, too; they need a myth as passionately as anyone else, they need a hero. Tamburlaine the Scourge of Asia conquered half the world by the time he reached your age but you can quickly make up for lost time.’

‘Set him free.’

‘Who?’

‘Your son. My brother, if you are my father.’

‘I’m frightened of him,’ said Donally after a long silence.

A shivering howl rose through the dark air and Marianne raised her head from Jewel’s breast to listen.

‘Set him free and I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll even learn to play the conquering hero, if you set him free.’

‘But what would happen then?’

‘If you refuse, you’d better take him to the Professors so they can cage him and give him blood tests.’

Donally shook the flask and heard no liquid rattle within. He dropped it on the floor of the cart.

‘Take him and leave him?’

‘No. Take him away but never come back yourself. Go home. I’m tired of you.’

‘Don’t be hasty. Consider.’

‘How can I possibly trust you if you’re frightened of something? Take your spells and prayers elsewhere and take away that bloody snake which signifies nothing. I don’t want you any more.’

‘But you still need me.’