Heroes and Villains Page 3

  The trees surrounded her with vertical perspectives which obscured the flow of the hills. Here were wolves, bears, lions, phantoms and beggars but she saw nothing though she walked as softly as she could. It was long past midday and the sunlight fell in slanting rays on the trunks of the trees. She startled an antlered stag, who swished away through the undergrowth before she had a chance to see him properly; she remembered the antlers on the head of the Barbarian who fell from the museum roof and recollected that particular May Day was ten years before, exactly. Blossom covered the hawthorn bushes, the wilderness bloomed. Moon-daisies, buttercups and all manner of wild flowers hid in the foaming grass. She saw a variegated snake twined round the bough of a tree but it did not harm her, did not even stick its forked tongue out at her. Bird song and the wind in the leaves seemed not to diminish but to intensify the silence; she could hear her own blood moving through her body.

  She thought she was alone until she came upon a man in a robe of black fur and many necklaces. She stepped back quickly into the bushes before he saw her. He was crouching on the ground grubbing up plants with a small spade and putting them in a basket. He was a huge man, well over six feet tall, with black hair frizzed out in a cloud down to his shoulders and a scanty, double-pointed beard dyed scarlet on one side and purple on the other. As he worked, he muttered to himself. A donkey was tethered to a tree nearby and, also tethered to a tree, was a child.

  The child had a collar round his neck fastened to a chain. He was naked but for a very ragged pair of trousers. He was eating something and slobbering. He was twelve or thirteen. He was covered with a snaky, interlaced pattern of tattooing all over his chest, arms and face. Suddenly this child began to cry out and thresh around, foaming at the mouth. The man dropped his spade, went to the child and kicked him many times. The child shrieked and subsided to a babbling murmur, rubbing his ribs where the man had kicked. The man returned to his gardening without more ado, referring from time to time to a book with coloured illustrations which lay on the ground beside him. Marianne was surprised to see the book for she had been told the Barbarians were quite illiterate. The red marks of the blows glowed against the greenish pallor of the child’s flesh. Marianne slipped away noiselessly. She had thought herself entirely private and was a little unnerved to unexpectedly encounter a man with a book.

  She soon found herself on a road. She broke through a brake of hawthorn and tumbled down a bank on to a wide, firm, green highway – green since overgrown with grass and weeds but, still, a road. She clambered back into the hedgerow and concealed herself, for she heard the sounds of horses’ hooves. She was not frightened at all, only curious; the nomads rounded a curve in the road and, from her hidey hole, she watched them pass.

  They had rough, unpainted carts piled with cooking gear, blankets, skins of animals, weapons and other domestic equipment she could not identify. A few children, some of the crippled and some of the old rode on the carts but most of the women walked beside them, even those swollen with pregnancy. Many of the women were pregnant. They guided the horses or drove a few skinny cattle before them. There were many horses and ponies, far more horses than cattle or goats.

  The women wore trousers or long cumbersome skirts made out of stolen blankets, or stolen cloth, or leather, or fur. They had blouses, some beautifully embroidered, and rough, sleeveless jackets usually of either fur or leather; some wore Soldiers’ jackets though the black leather had been transformed by the application of beads, braiding and feathers. They were all decorated with astonishing, tawdry jewellery, some of it plainly salvaged from the ruins and of great age, some weirdly fashioned from animal bones and baked clay. Their hair was wound with ribbons and feathers; their faces were painted a little round the eyes or else tattooed with serpentine lines like those on the child in the wood. Most were barefoot, though some wore stolen boots or sandals made of straw.

  These women were both worn and garish. She had never seen women like them before, so bright and wild and hung about with children. The domestic life of the Barbarians was a mystery to her; she had thought they would have no marriage or taking in marriage. The outrageous visitors to her village had seemed to exist only in that lurid moment and could have no other life, as if they were explosions of violence produced by the earth itself. Now she saw, passing in a mute cortège, the wives and families who profited from the looting, indeed, who necessitated it, children too weary to cry, scabbed, dirty and marked with malnutrition. The picture of misery.

  The men walked beside them. They slouched, spat and scratched. They, too, were hung with beads and curious stones, perhaps charms and talismans. But they left their warpaint off though they were even more heavily tattooed than the women. They tied back their long hair with thongs of leather. No furs nor armour on this brilliant May Day; most went shirtless and their bones showed through their tattooed skins. They all had knives in their belts and most had rifles slung over their shoulders. One man paused to urinate in the grass at the foot of the bank where Marianne hid. There was a grisly wound on his shoulder; he struck away flies from it, it was beginning to fester. Starved skeletons of dogs, several with fiery eruptions of mange, walked among their masters. Their tongues lolled out and their tails drooped between their legs. They had all come a long way.

  In the last cart of all, a very clean and stately old lady sat bolt upright. She shone like a washed star in that filthy company and she wore a prim, green dress such as Worker women wore. Her hair was done up in a knot and she wore stockings and shoes. She was obviously of some consequence in the tribe. A youngish man walked beside her, talking to her, but Marianne could not see his face because he wore a soft, wide-brimmed hat of felt pulled down over his forehead. Many of the Barbarians wore such hats. There were about sixty men, women and children in this long procession. They scarcely exchanged a word with one another, not even the children, but moved in the silence of near exhaustion.

  Marianne had a clean bed and quiet sleeps. Watching these cruelly dispossessed survivors go by, she was glad she lived in the tranquil order of the Professors; she had never been glad of it before. The fearful strangers now revealed their true faces and these faces were sick, sad and worn. Two or three Soldiers could have gunned them all down as they walked and she sensed that hardly one of the Barbarians would have had the heart to draw their own weapons to defend themselves. All would fall down as if bitterly appreciative of a chance to rest. She forgave them their depredations for they had so little. Then the man on the donkey came following them with the child running beside him on the end of his chain. The man and his donkey were now hung with baskets of plants and the child’s arms were full of greenstuff.

  This man glanced suspiciously around him as if he guessed there were spies in the hedgerow. She shrank back among the leaves and he, too, passed by, kicking his donkey to an unwilling trot to catch up with the rest. The child blubbered with the effort of keeping up. Marianne did not know where they were all bound but she hoped it was not her home. It was a long way home.

  When she finally arrived home, so late the gate was locked and she had to explain her absence to the guards, she found something had happened that wiped the Barbarians out of her mind. In a fit of senile frenzy, the old nurse had killed her father with an axe and then poisoned herself with some stuff she used for cleaning brass. The Colonel of the Soldiers, her mother’s brother, took Marianne to live with him in the Barracks. She kept her father’s books for a time but found she could not bear to read them and in the end she burned them. She took his clock out to a piece of swamp and drowned it. It vanished under the yielding earth, still emitting a faint tick. She found a pair of scissors and chopped off all her long, fair hair so she looked like a demented boy. She had no idea why she cropped her head; the impulse seized her. It made her very ugly and she examined her ugliness in mirrors with a violent pleasure. When she looked for the scissors again, convinced there was some other violation she could perform upon herself, she could not find them, nor could she find any
knives.

  ‘This place is like a grave,’ she said to her uncle.

  ‘There is not enough discipline,’ he said. ‘That old woman was maladjusted. She should have been given treatment.’

  This was the way the Soldiers talked.

  ‘She loved us when we were alive,’ said Marianne without realizing what she was saying. Appalled, she corrected herself: ‘I mean, when I was young.’

  ‘She was seriously maladjusted,’ said her uncle, crashing his fist upon the table. ‘She should have been subjected to tests and then operated upon.’

  He pierced Marianne with a shrewd, assessing glance, as if suspicious of her. He decided she should be taken out of herself.

  ‘Learn to drive a car,’ he said. ‘Then you could go out with the convoys to the other communities and see a bit of life.’

  He was so determined to subject her to discipline that she learned to drive. It was very easy. She meagrely survived and the Workers made the hay. It was midsummer, the air was very soft and sweet in the evenings. Just before the summer solstice, the Barbarians attacked once more, at twilight, as the lamps were being lit and the village sat down to supper. The alarm bell rang and her uncle sprang up from table, reaching for his gun belt.

  ‘Lock the doors.’

  But Marianne ran through the door while it was still open and went through the housing quarters up to a deserted dormitory. She saw the scene of ten years before, the painted Barbarians of ten years before, the tribe of the road through the forest now decked out in legendary horror. But all was obscured by the dusk, though she made out the ones who robbed quietly in an admirably ordered fashion as the battle went on; however, in the tremendous confusion of darkness, she could make out little more. Then they turned on arc lamps and the battle was suffused with white, hysterical light; but this only made confusion visible and still machine guns could not be used. Riderless horses reared like breakers in the streets. She saw a man in a dark suit rush suddenly from the tower where the Professors lived and throw himself purposefully under the hooves of a horse, which trampled him.

  A blurred figure in furs materialized from the chaos. The rising moon sparkled on his necklaces. He ran down the lane beside the Barracks; she guessed he was weaponless and trying to escape. A Soldier followed him and jumped him from behind. They fell and struggled together. She was the audience again. She watched them, as she had done before, and thought she saw another death, for the Soldiers were trained in judo and karate and he brought down a chopping blow on the Barbarian’s neck and left him limp in the dirt, himself returning at once to the main theatre of combat. But after a few minutes the Barbarian slowly rose and shook himself.

  The lane beside the Barracks was dark and empty. The beating had clearly shaken him. He rose weakly to his hands and knees, fell down again and lay still for a while. Then he began to crawl. At the end of the lane was the shed where the armoured lorries were kept, besides a few draught horses, all in together. The Barbarian knelt on the ground, hugging his furs around him; then, supporting himself with a hand on the wall, he rose and broke into an uncertain run. He disappeared into the shed, for the door had carelessly been left open.

  ‘We got five of the bastards, this time,’ said her uncle with satisfaction. Once he had washed off the blood, they resumed the meal begun three hours previously.

  ‘Only two wounded on our side. Look at that fool Professor of Psychology, though; kicked to death. Serve him right, maladjusted. We know their tricks by now. I did for two of them with my own hands. They were the same lot who got your brother, Marianne. I knew them by their paint. We’ll send out a patrol when it’s light to find their camp. Stamp ’em out. Eliminate them.’

  When he reached for the bread, his hand accidentally brushed against Marianne’s and she started violently. She was perverse and she turned against her own people when she thought of the miserable encampment where verminous children and women with feathers in their hair would wait a long time for men who would never return. Washed and naked, gashed with wounds, five corpses waited for the anonymous pit; a sixth man, as good as dead, skulked in the garage. She felt an extraordinary curiosity about him. Some at least of this curiosity sprang from a simple desire to fraternize with the enemy because she felt so little attached to her alleged friends; some of it was a simple desire to see the stranger’s face close at hand; and some was perhaps related to pity.

  When the family slept, she took a loaf and some cheese from the kitchen and crept out into the night. They had locked the shed door securely, presumably after cursorily searching the shed, but she guessed the Barbarian was still inside it for, if they had found him, her uncle would have been sure to mention it. She knew where the keys were kept. A horse moved in odorous confinement. Hay rustled. A finger of moonlight rested on the lacquered side of a lorry. She listened but could hear nobody breathing. She spoke into the darkness.

  ‘I’ve brought you some food.’

  Nothing stirred.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I won’t give you away.’

  She stepped inside the shed. As she knew would happen, the Barbarian put his hand on her mouth and twisted her arms up behind her. She felt the innumerable rings he wore grind into her face and she immediately bit his fingers as hard as she could. He tightened his hold. He put his mouth against her ear.

  ‘Get me out of here and I’ll do you no harm but if you shout, I’ll strangle you.’

  His right hand dropped from her mouth to her throat; she coughed and spat.

  ‘It’s quite unnecessary to strangle me,’ she whispered angrily. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘I fainted,’ he said as if this had surprised and affronted him. He slurred his words together and his voice had the rough edges of a man accustomed to speaking in the open air but she understood him quite well. She gave him the food and he ate it. She could not see him at all.

  ‘Will you rape me and sew a cat up inside me?’ she inquired, remembering her nurse’s warning.

  ‘There are no cats to be had,’ he pointed out in as reasonable a voice as she could desire. Then he resumed such an absolute silence that she told him the thing that was on her mind, as if it would explain and justify her unexpected presence beside him.

  ‘My father’s dead.’

  ‘So’s mine. When did yours die?’

  ‘Last month.’

  ‘Mine died this time ten years ago. He was murdered.’

  ‘So was mine.’

  ‘It’s the same everywhere you look, it’s red in tooth and claw. Do you want to come with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said immediately. If she had allowed herself to think, she would never have said this.

  ‘Can you drive these things?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Then you can crash a lorry through the gate, can’t you. That will be impressive.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said for there was nothing but custom to keep her in the village and nothing she wanted to take away with her; not a single one of all those things she had once possessively marked with her name now seemed to belong to her. She had wanted to rescue him but found she was accepting his offer to rescue her. A movement indicated his presence; she felt his hand smear some greasy thing on her face, some of his warpaint.

  ‘I’ve made my mark on you,’ he said. ‘Now you’re my hostage.’

  ‘Not at all!’ she exclaimed. ‘I –’

  ‘Open the door wide. Come on.’

  In the moonlight, she was surprised by the angel of death. She was not prepared for this spectre; talking to him, she had altogether forgotten what he would look like. She scrambled from the cabin of the lorry and dashed back into the depths of the shed, looking for a place to hide from him, but he caught her easily, scooped her up and carried her bodily to the lorry, depositing her in the cab. She kicked and scratched but even now did not cry out to wake the village.

  ‘No second thoughts, my ducks,’ he said. ‘You’ve done it.’

  He was laughing and seemed v
ery excited, as though it would have been boring and easy for him had she been too compliant. Danger was perhaps his element. He planted her hands on the steering wheel for her.

  ‘Drive,’ he suggested.

  Moonlight flooded the shed and bleached the strange colours from his face but for the black that ringed his eyes, and moonlight also changed some blood on his face from red to black. The sleeping village lay under the moon; the Soldiers with their glass faces stood by the gate, glass faces even more unnatural than paint and not half so mysterious. She loved nobody in this place but beyond it lay the end of all known things and certain desolation. She hesitated and the stranger caught her by the throat again. She pushed him away and started up the lorry.

  He crowed with delighted laughter.

  They had gone a hundred yards before she heard the alarum bells ringing above the sound of the engine. As they crashed through the wooden gate, the first bullets from the sentries bounced off the cabin. They left the start of hubbub behind them and roared along the road the Soldiers used.

  ‘Shake ’em off,’ he ordered, hanging out of the window to look after him. ‘They’re coming after us on their motorbikes.’

  She veered off through a field of tender young wheat. He fell back inside the cabin. The cut on his face had opened up again and he wiped away the blood with his wrist.

  ‘Even so, it hurts me to destroy good bread,’ she said.