Heroes and Villains Read online

  Marianne found a piece of biscuit in her pocket and ate it. She wore a checked skirt and a brown sweater. She had long, blonde pigtails. She broke things to see what they were like inside. Her brother was sixteen, ten years older than she. Her nurse said: ‘You ought to love your brother’ and Marianne asked: ‘Why?’ Now she was left alone and forgotten, high in the tower on such a beautiful day. When she finished her biscuit, she was still hungry and gnawed the end of her plait for want of anything better.

  She watched the detachment of Soldiers come out, preceded by a small military band which played a selection of marches. All wore uniforms of black leather and plastic helmets with glass visors. They had rifles slung over their backs. All the community had gathered to watch them; Marianne saw her mother and her nurse in the crowd and saw her brother among the Soldiers. Everyone was clean and proper, shirts and dresses white as paper, suits as black as ink. Marianne was bored. A bird came and perched on the balcony. It cocked its head and offered her a cynical regard. It was a seagull.

  ‘Hello, bird,’ she said. ‘Have you come a long way? Have you seen any Barbarians?’

  She liked the wild, quatrosyllabic lilt of the word, ‘Barbarian’. Then, looking beyond the wooden fence, she saw a trace of movement in the fields beyond. It was not the wind among the young corn; or, if it was the wind among the young corn, it carried her the raucous whinny of a horse. It was too early for poppies but she saw a flare of scarlet. She ceased to watch the Soldiers; instead, she watched the movement flow to the fences and crash through them and across the tender wheat. Bursting from the undergrowth came horseman after horseman, filling the air with terrible screamings. They were dressed in furs and brilliant rags. A look-out in a watch tower had already been strangled to let them through and the men at the sentry post were playing cards so they did not see the visitors in time; two Soldiers, paying the price of lack of discipline, were shot. Then all was chaos.

  The rabble came to ravage, steal, despoil, rape and, if necessary, to kill. Like hobgoblins of nightmare, their flesh was many colours and great manes of hair flew out behind them. They flashed with curious curved plates of metal dredged up from the ruins. Their horses were bizarrely caparisoned with rags, small knives, bells and chains dangling from manes and tails, and man and horse together, unholy centaurs crudely daubed with paint, looked twice as large as life. They fired long guns. Confronted with terrors of the night in the freshest hours of the morning, the gentle crowd scattered, wailing.

  Marianne bemusedly saw a good deal of blood, as when animals were slaughtered, but when she raised her eyes from the battle-field of the village green, she noticed a second party of Barbarians (bristling with knives but far less gaudily painted) who jumped the wires without flamboyance and now, while the fighters were engaged, were calmly occupied in seizing sacks of flour, crocks of butter and bolts of cloth while nobody attempted to stop them. They went in and out of the houses, occasionally making threatening passes with their knives, and then she saw some Worker women seemed to be helping them. Marianne thought this was very interesting.

  Soldiers and Barbarians fought hand to hand. Riderless horses seethed back and forth, screeching. Noises of gunfire and voices rose up to Marianne and she listened absorbedly. A Barbarian in a helmet of feathers decorated with the antlers of a stag appeared like a crazy sunrise on the flat roof of the museum; he held a knife between his teeth and was about to spring into the mêlée below when a bullet shattered his eyes. The knife fell from his lean lips. He inscribed a great arc on the morning as he dived forward to the ground, spouting his brains. He was the first man Marianne saw die; the second was her brother.

  He rolled in the dust with a shaggy Barbarian boy armed with a knife. They threshed and wrestled, ends of fur blurring their faces, and the knife kept flashing in the sun. They were some way from the general fighting as if they had arrived beneath her viewing platform on purpose to demonstrate violence to her. The Barbarian boy’s mound of black plaits and ringlets covered and uncovered them but she saw them staring at one another, both oddly startled, as if this was the last thing they expected to happen, this embrace to the kill.

  Their mother had returned to the tower. Perhaps she saw them and perhaps she called out and perhaps her brother heard her voice or some distracting noise for he glanced away from his adversary, who immediately took advantage of this lost guard to stick a knife into the other’s throat. Blood bubbled. The Barbarian boy dropped the knife and clasped his victim in his arms, holding him with a strange, terrible tenderness until he was still and dead. Marianne waited for somebody to shoot the Barbarian boy but nobody with a gun was available. The boy pushed the newly-made corpse against the wall and sat back on his haunches, pushing the hair out of his face. She saw he had several loops of beads around his neck and his hands were covered with rings. Since Marianne looked down at him from so high up, he appeared foreshortened and she only noticed his rings because they caught the light. The sound of the fighting was terrible music. The boy looked up and saw the severe child who watched him.

  An expression of blind terror crossed his face, which was painted in stripes of black, red and white. He made some vague, terrified gestures with his hands; when she was much older and thought about him, which she came to do obsessively, she guessed these were gestures with which he hoped to ward off the evil eye. She chewed her pigtail. He scrambled upright. Many bullets now rattled into the wall behind him; a bullet struck the corpse so it shuddered with the imitation of life but a riderless horse galloped through the gunfire and the boy was all at once up and gone. The horsemen were all gone; the raid was all over.

  There was now a deep silence broken only by the lowing of frightened cattle and the screams of a few dying horses and some dying men. Five Soldiers died, in all. A couple of Barbarians were left behind, too badly wounded to escape; the Soldiers briskly shot them, dug a pit and buried them. A woman had gone away with the Barbarians, as sometimes happened. Food, cloth and also some calves and chickens had been taken, enough to recompense the raiders for their losses. It was typical of any of their visits.

  Her father found Marianne when it was dark. She was asleep in the farthest corner of the room from the balcony. She was sucking her thumb. She dreamed of dark, painted faces and woke in tears. Her father kissed her.

  ‘It is all over and you must go to bed.’

  She was hungry and remembered she had seen unusual amounts of food prepared that morning; she did not know these had become the funeral baked meats.

  ‘I want cakes and stuff,’ she said.

  ‘You mustn’t ask your mother for cake, now,’ he said and brought her milk and slices of bread and butter in her own room. Although she did not know why, she cried herself to sleep; her father held her hand for a while. He had no hair on his head nor any eyelashes, either.

  ‘Your brother’s gone to the ruins, where the dead people go,’ said Marianne’s nurse. ‘It’s well known the ruins are full of ghosts.’

  Wherever he went, their mother shortly followed him. Her son’s death broke her heart; she lingered on for two more years but when she ate some poison fruit she took sick almost gladly and made no resistance to death. After that, Marianne and her father lived alone together with the old nurse, who was now too old to live anywhere else. They got on very well. He taught his daughter reading, writing and history. She read his library of old books; in the white tower, in his study, she looked out of the window across the fields to the swamps and brambles and tried to imagine a forest of men.

  ‘Can you visualize the number “one million”, Marianne?’ said her father. Marianne tried to envisage all the people in the village and then that again and then that again and that again, again and again, until they were infinite, there was no counting them, and she shook her head.

  ‘Say goodbye to the concept of plurality, in that case,’ he said. ‘It used to be very important. And what does the word “city” mean?’

  She thought for a while.

  �
�Ruins?’ she hazarded.

  So he directed her back to his books, Mumford etc., and to the dictionaries; but the dictionaries contained innumerable incomprehensible words she could only define through their use in his other books, for these words had ceased to describe facts and now stood only for ideas or memories.

  She grew less spiteful but now showed unusual lines in her face as if she would not be easily satisfied. Her father said there were no such things as ghosts so she would go off by herself into the swamp, although her nurse forbade her. Marianne was very wiry and agile. She picked her way where the sheep went, trying to imagine numbers of men, women and children, but she never fell over or hurt herself. She learned to beware of the ugly plants covered with razor-sharp thorns that grew everywhere and never even to touch the sticky, green and purple berries swarming with iridescent flies which these plants produced in autumn, for the noxious sap burned the fingers. She knew how brambles sometimes masked the mouths of bottomless vents in the ground, the original purpose of which baffled her. She found out that if she ignored the obese and hugely fanged rats who nested in the choked sewers and sometimes came out to play, they would ignore her.

  Shells of houses now formed a dangerous network of caves, all so overgrown it seemed nothing could ever have lived there and she never found anyone, though sometimes she would find the picked remains of bones of animals and human excrement, indicating that the ghosts in the ruins ate and defecated and therefore were unlikely to be ghosts at all, or ghosts only in the sense that they had forfeited their social personalities, like those mendicants of the swamp who sometimes came begging at the gates of the village, men and women running with sores, filth and rags scarcely covering their deformities. Sometimes the Soldiers threw bread to them and sometimes frightened them away by firing bullets over their shapeless heads but they were never let in.

  ‘They are the outcasts of the outcasts,’ said her father. When she was twelve, he told her:

  ‘Before the war, there were places called Universities where men did nothing but read books and conduct experiments. These men had certain privileges, though mostly unstated ones: but all the same, some Professors were allowed in the deep shelters with their families, during the war, and they proved to be the only ones left who could resurrect the gone world in a gentler shape, and try to keep destruction outside, this time.’

  He had read more books than any other Professor in the community. He reconstructed the past; that was his profession. His lashless eyes were bleared with shortness of sight; soon he would go blind and then have nothing but the things he could touch such as his little clock. Marianne would have to read his books aloud to him. Rousseau, for example. He was writing a book on the archaeology of social theory but maybe nobody in the community would want to read it, except Marianne, and she might not understand it. Theirs was primarily a community of farmers with the intellectual luxury of a few Professors who corresponded by the trading convoys with others of their kind in other places. And the Soldiers were there to protect them all.

  ‘There were no wild beasts in the woods, before the war. And scarcely any woods, to speak of. And everyone alive was interlinked, though some more loosely meshed into the pattern than others. Now it has all separated out; there are genuses of men, not simply Homo faber any more. Now there is Homo faber, to which genus we belong ourselves; but also Homo praedatrix, Homo silvestris and various others. In those days, Marianne, people kept wild beasts such as lions and tigers in cages and looked at them for information. Who would have thought they would take to our climate so kindly, when the fire came and let them out?’

  He was fond of posing questions of this type, as were all the Professors; but especially her father. Sometimes she thought he was not talking to her at all but to himself or to a congregation of scholars who only existed in his mind. Nevertheless, she listened to every word he said.

  Now and then the community broke from its trance. A Worker went mad one midnight and fired the house where his wife and three children slept. They choked and smothered. He ran through the streets laughing and weeping, entered the Professor’s tower and flung himself from the balcony. Suicide was not uncommon among Workers and Professors when they reached a certain age and felt the approach of senility and loss of wits, though it was unknown among the Soldiers, who learned discipline. But homicide was very rare and usually happened shortly before a Barbarian raid.

  Another time, an old man broke into the museum and began systematically to wreck the glass cases and the treasures beneath them. He found a tin of red paint and wrote on the wall of the museum: I AM AN OLD MAN AND I WANT THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT NOW. He reached the stores of petrol with a candle in his fist but a warning bell rang and the Soldiers shot him before he could do more harm. The Soldiers also dealt inscrutably with the deformed.

  Her father said: ‘The Soldiers are delegated to police us and protect us but they are developing an autonomous power of their own.’

  Shortly after the incident in the museum, there was another visit from the Barbarians. The raid was an expected surprise; six years was a long time to pass without one but the time-scale of the community stretched out years for ever and also somehow cancelled them out, so an event could as well have taken place yesterday or ten years before. These Barbarians were not the tribe who killed Marianne’s brother; these came by foot at night, secretly and perfidiously, poisoning cattle they did not steal, sliding past the Soldiers’ look-out on their bellies and strangling those on guard. Four Worker women vanished.

  ‘They slit the bellies of the women after they’ve raped them and sew up cats inside,’ said the nurse, now a very old woman growing strange in her ways.

  ‘I think that’s most unlikely,’ said Marianne. ‘In the first place, I don’t think they have cats. We have cats to keep the mice from the corn and to use up our spare affection. They don’t grow corn and they don’t look to me as if they’re very affectionate, either.’

  ‘You young ones think you know everything about everything whereas, in fact, you know nothing about anything,’ said the old woman. ‘One day the Barbarians will get you and sew a cat up inside you and then you’ll know, all right.’

  Though Marianne did not believe her, she felt a certain quiver in her belly as though a cat, a black one like the one her nurse owned, prowled around down there. She recalled with visionary clarity the face of the murdering boy with his necklaces, rings and knife, although the memory of her brother’s face was totally blurred. Sometimes she dreamed of his death; one day, waking from this dream, she realized the two faces had super-imposed themselves entirely on each other and all she saw was the boy killing himself or his double. This recurring dream disturbed her and she awoke sweating, though not precisely with fear.

  ‘Rousseau spoke of a noble savage but this is a time of ignoble savages. Think of the savage who murdered your brother,’ her father said.

  ‘I do,’ she confessed. ‘Quite often.’

  He wound his fingers together and looked at her with a kind of fear. He had colourless eyes, like rainwater. His voice was thin and cool and his skin had a certain transparency; he wore a good, dark suit, as all Professors did. Marianne loved him so much she only wished she could be more sure he was really there.

  ‘Is there a young man in the community you would like to marry?’ he asked her when she was sixteen.

  She considered the cadets one by one. Every Professor’s eldest son became a cadet among the Soldiers, that was the tradition. Then she considered the Professors’ younger sons, nascent Professors themselves since it was a hereditary caste. They were all hereditary castes. She even ran her mind’s eye over the Workers. After all this consideration, Marianne acknowledged it was impossible for her to consider marriage with any of the young men in the community.

  ‘I don’t want to marry,’ she said. ‘I don’t see the point. I could maybe marry a stranger, someone from outside, but nobody here. Everybody here is so terribly boring, Father.’

  ‘Your mother w
as a remarkable woman,’ he said, from the depths of some sudden preoccupation of his own. ‘She married me in spite of my deformity. I was a lucky man.’

  ‘I think she was the lucky one,’ said Marianne.

  ‘We are all arbitrary children of calamity,’ he said in his academic voice. ‘We have to take the leavings.’

  ‘I don’t see why!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘You will,’ he said. She thought of her nurse saying: ‘You know nothing about anything,’ and she thought: ‘He’s old.’ She looked at him with immense tenderness, as if he were sick of an incurable disease.

  ‘You never made friends with the other children,’ he said. ‘I know you’d rather not live here but there is nowhere else to go and chaos is the opposite pole of boredom, Marianne.’

  They had long ago stopped using the dining-room and he moved the clock into his study. It made a small, private ticking as he talked, as if the time it told was a secret between the three of them.

  ‘If the Barbarians inherit the earth, they will finally destroy it, they won’t know what to do with it. Their grandfathers survived outside the shelters, somehow; they survived at first by accident and continue to survive only by tenacity. They hunt, maraud and prey on us for the things they need and can’t make themselves and never realize we are necessary to them. When they finally destroy us, if they finally destroy us, they’ll destroy their own means of living so I do not think they will destroy us. I think an equilibrium will be maintained. But the Soldiers would like to destroy them, for Soldiers need to be victorious, and if the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?’

  Marianne loved him so she tactfully hid her yawn behind her hand. She loved him but he bored her.

  She hated the May Day Festival. She took some food and escaped very early in the morning. She went farther into the ruins than she had ever been before. She found a passage that must once have been a wide road where she could walk with perfect ease. She penetrated to the fossilized heart of the city, a wholly mineralized terrain where nothing existed but chunks of blackish, rusty stone. Here even the briars refused to grow and pools of water from the encroaching swampland contained nothing but viscid darkness. All was silence; the rabbits did not burrow here nor the birds nest. She found a bundle of rags with putrified flesh inside and looked no further but hurried on until the swamp and brush began and the ruins merged almost imperceptibly with a shrubland of bushes and small trees, still pocked here and there with overgrown buildings. Then she entered the forest.