Heroes and Villains Read online

  He looked at the cornfield and then at her.

  ‘I see you’re an intellectual,’ he remarked obscurely.

  ‘I never thought you’d know such a word!’ she exclaimed, tearing open a hedge.

  ‘I’m bloody well educated,’ he said. ‘And my name is Jewel.’

  ‘Who’d have thought it.’

  ‘I am the cleverest of all the savages,’ he told her. ‘But by no means the kindest.’

  ‘Will you be kind to me?’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  They reached the end of the farmland and went through the wire fence, setting off a carillon of alarum bells.

  ‘I know a road through the ruins,’ she said. ‘Though they say the ruins are full of ghosts.’

  She thought he was bound to be superstitious but all he said was:

  ‘Drive on.’

  Now they entered the arid zone and the lamps of the lorry picked out a few bony skeletons on either side of the shadow of a road along which they hurtled at a crazy speed. He stared out of the window.

  ‘Faster.’

  ‘I can’t go any faster. Is anyone following?’

  He opened the door and swung out on it; she was already growing accustomed to his extraordinary appearance, streaked with moonlight.

  ‘Can’t see. Faster, go faster, anyway.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  He howled in fury and hit her. She then became very angry herself but found she could force still more perilous speed from the lorry and so they went on. The ruins dipped and reared on either side. They could not tell where their pursuers were or if they had any pursuers. The moon veered back and forth across the sky and everything around them shifted and tilted continually. Every minute she expected to crash. The forest started. To the right of the road he saw an oak tree with a thick trunk covered with ivy.

  ‘Drive into that. Go on.’

  She directed the lorry towards the tree, convinced they would both die in a few seconds. But he opened the door on his side of the cabin, grabbed her shoulders, hauled her from her seat and jumped. The lorry crashed on, driverless, hit the tree with the loudest bang she had ever heard and burst into flames. They fell softly into a marshy pool.

  He released her and watched the fire. First his face expressed a delighted glee and then became impassive. The heat of the flames bathed their faces. When the green tree took fire, spurts of acrid smoke, blown on the wind, made her eyes water.

  ‘They’ll see you,’ she said. ‘You’ve sent them up a big signal to show where you are. Why on earth have you done that?’

  He turned to look at her curiously. He had red paint on his cheekbones, the firelight turned it red again. He appeared about to speak but thought better of it, shrugging.

  He dragged her out of the mud and led her some distance into the forest, till they reached a place where they could see the road from the rasping core of a clump of ferns. Soon a posse of Soldiers whined up on motorcycles. Jewel clasped her mouth firmly with his hand but she would have stayed silent, anyway, for the moonlight glistened so strangely on the glass visors and slick leather limbs of the Soldiers they seemed mechanical, ingenious objects who would not have heard her if she had cried. The Soldiers searched in the glowing debris of the lorry for bones and ashes of flesh and diligently investigated the road by the light of torches they brought with them but they found nothing. They must have decided, at last, that the fire had consumed the driver along with the lorry for they gathered together, consulted for a moment, then remounted their motorcycles and drove back in a convoy the way they had come. And that was the last Marianne saw of them.

  She did not know how they had described the situation to themselves, whether or not they thought it the act of a man unhinged by the day’s violence; no doubt, next morning, when they found her bed empty, her uncle would murmur how she had never adjusted to her father’s death, that she lacked discipline and he wished he had not taught her to drive. Then she realized with surprise that Jewel had organized an official suicide for her. He relaxed his grip. He had bruised her jaw. He was grinning; she saw his teeth flash.

  ‘I told you I was clever,’ he said. Then, as if overcome with weariness, he lay down in the grass beside her and was immediately asleep.

  It grew very cold and soon the moon went down. No sound broke the dark, enormous silence of the night. She stripped off Jewel’s fur and wrapped herself in it; it was the pelt of a red fox and, beneath it, he wore a rough coat of tanned hide with the pile on the inside. This coat smelled rank because the hide had been badly cured. He muttered something in his sleep and moved close to her until he slept with his head on her lap. She touched his beads and wondered whether to strangle him with them. He was very warm and very heavy; he appeared to trust her entirely and she let go of his necklace, for nobody had trusted her since her father died. They had hidden knives and scissors from her and talked to her in soft, conciliatory voices. After a while, she began to cry for her father. She could not stop crying until the day was about to begin.

  2

  Twined in this fortuitous embrace, Jewel and Marianne lay among the curling ferns. At first, outlines but no colours appeared in the forest and all was blank forms of uniform and phantom grey but, after the sun penetrated the branches, the trees acquired flesh from the darkness and, as the sky grew light, she saw nothing that was not green or else covered with flowers. Plants she could not name thrust luscious spires towards her hands; great chestnuts fantastically turreted with greenish bloom arched above her head; the curded white blossom of hawthorn closed every surrounding perspective and a running tangle of little roses went in and out, this way and that way, through the leafy undergrowth. These roses opened flat as plates and from them drifted the faintest and most tremulous of scents, like that of apples. Though this scent was so fragile, still it seemed the real breath of a wholly new and vegetable world, a world as unknown and mysterious to Marianne as the depths of the sea; or the body of the young man who slept, it would seem, sweetly, in her lap. An awakened bird clattered upwards and she heard stirrings in the brambles. Without any fear, she waited for a red-eyed wolf or grinning bear who might come, as she had heard they did, to eat up hungrily both her and her companion. But nothing appeared. Only the trees moved and they infrequently.

  Meanwhile, in the village, they would be rising and making fires, smoke starting to drift from the chimneys. Women whose eyes were still thick with sleep stirred the porridge and cows lowed to be milked. Children were running to feed the chickens and the stentorian cocks didactically announced the beginning of a new day, though this new day was bound to be indistinguishable from all the rest. Except a Professor girl had gone crazy in the night and ended it by burning herself alive. As the new day began, Jewel opened his eyes and stared at her. Trapped in his regard so closely and suddenly, she briefly experienced a sensation of falling. His eyes were such a blank, inexpressive brown the colour might have been painted on the backs of the irises. The left eye was very much puffed and swollen because of the cut immediately above it. A few birds began to sing. Jewel was seized with a violent fit of coughing; his body shook convulsively, he rolled away with unexpected gentility and spat. Maybe something was wrong with his lungs. When he recovered himself, he said:

  ‘You been awake all night?’

  She nodded.

  ‘That’s pretty stupid,’ he said. He looked at her closely. ‘Been crying?’

  She nodded again. He shrugged. The early light was now beautifully iridescent and took substantial form in drops of white dew strung out on the rough surfaces of his coat. His face was a spoiled palette; she could make out no features beneath the thick crust of colours and dried blood.

  ‘I could have killed you in your sleep,’ she said.

  ‘But you forbore,’ he remarked and was once more convulsed, doubled up with such noisy coughing he frightened morning birds into the air. When the coughing was over, he gave the impression of assembling himself together again, perhaps rather painfu
lly, as if each attack disintegrated him a little more. But there was still nothing at all she could see of his face and what was she to do when it was so hard to look at him, harder still to describe him and hardest of all to know how he would look when they reached their destination, this wild man who now rose, stretched, squinted, first towards the sky, then downwards to the ashes of the lorry and the tree? He laughed quietly to himself. He was as complete a stranger as she could wish to meet and her only companion. He had a ring on every finger and two on some.

  ‘Thought you was a boy at first,’ he offered conversationally. ‘Who chopped all your hair off?’

  ‘Nobody. I did. Myself.’

  ‘Thought it might be a punishment for something.’ He yawned again and then approached her sideways with circumspection, although offering her his hand. She continued to sit quite still.

  ‘What if I say I’m not coming any farther with you?’

  ‘Well …’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t believe you.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘You can’t go back to your village, can you? You wouldn’t half look a fool, wandering back with some concocted story to explain what happened. And they wouldn’t believe you; they’d invent a crime and punish you for it, for they wouldn’t understand why you had wanted to go away in the first place and would suspect you. And you can’t stay right here ’cos you’ve got nothing to eat and there’s peril of Out People, isn’t there, to say nothing of savage beasts.’

  She was very affronted at this apparent cheerfulness, especially since she decided he was right; she could not or would not return where she came from nor could she stay where she was. She refused his hand and got to her feet herself. She picked up the fox fur.

  ‘If I come with you, remember I’m coming of my own free will.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Sure.’

  They at once turned their backs on the road. He led her through the skirts of the forest until they came to a stream. It was now fully morning and solid gold kingcups floated on the surface of the blue water. He knelt, drank, dipped his face and washed away the rime of red, black and white. She knelt beside him, bathed her eyes, wiped the mark from her forehead and also drank. She was surprised to see his real face, which was wary, withdrawn, private, full of bones, dark and scored by weather. He was clean-shaven. His ears were pierced and he wore dangling earrings made of beaten tin. He began to unfasten his braided, decorated hair.

  ‘Why do you do your hair up so strangely?’ she asked.

  ‘It makes us more frightening,’ he said and grinned. She was glad he did not file his teeth to a point as was the fashion of many Barbarians. A maze of midges began to dance above the surface of the stream.

  ‘Is that why you paint your faces, also?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘The Professors think you have reverted to beasthood,’ she said censoriously. ‘You are a perfect illustration of the breakdown of social interaction and the death of social systems.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ he remarked with complete disinterest. He was occupied in watching her. If he looked strange to her, she seemed at least as strange again to him, since she was so small, clean, trim, pale and sure of herself. He had never seen a woman of her class so close before and he scrutinized her curiously, taking in her cloth skirt and white blouse now daubed with mud. They examined one another like interesting specimens but he got bored with looking first. There were stories among the Barbarians that Professor women did not bleed when you cut them; however, he did not believe these stories, though he fingered his last remaining knife thoughtfully.

  Soon it grew too hot for the fox pelt and she carried it over her arm. He walked on before her. Though the cloth of his clothes had been stolen from the Professors, it had been dyed from its original sober grey to camouflage colours of mossy greens and browns, for the Barbarians were hunters and practised dissimulation in the woods. He rarely glanced behind him and she had to make her way as best she could through the bushes, tall grass, bracken and flowers. She wondered how he came to be called Jewel; it was perhaps a corruption of some other name, perhaps a Biblical name such as Joel. Many of the Barbarians had adopted apocalyptic religious sects after the war, as had some of the Professors. Or perhaps he was called Jewel because he was so beautiful, though also very strange.

  There were small, pink blossoms on the brambles and yellow points on the gorse. The tallest cow parsley rose five or six feet high and he often used his knife to cut them a path. Some of the stems of fern were as thick as her wrist. Tangled in briars, she called out to the young man but he did not hear her for the forest seemed to merge into an element heavier than air, which drowned her voice. And an extraordinary silence reigned. The light, filtered through the leaves, seemed perfectly green. She tore her skirt free. Jewel waited for her beneath some giant skeletal candelabra of cow parsley; he was grinning again.

  ‘No wonder they had to put the Professors in shelters, when they can’t even find their way through a wood. If I wasn’t with you you’d walk round and round in circles.’

  ‘I’m not familiar with the country,’ she snapped angrily. He appeared to take immense, if derisive, pleasure in the pure, round sound of her vowels. She guessed he was taking her home as a battle trophy, of less use but more interest than a bolt of cloth. Her head ached with the viridian dazzle of the sunlit forest. As they went on, her eyes began to play her tricks. Now he seemed taller than the tallest of the trees; when he stretched out his arm, he could pull down the sky on everything. Then he shrank to a point of nothing and she lost him in the grass.

  ‘You should have had some sleep,’ he said with vague irritation, looming beside her, the whites of his eyes showing. ‘Now you’re all weak and feeble.’

  ‘I shall survive,’ she said, for she would not ask for any assistance.

  A squirrel chattered in the branches. It ticked away like her father’s clock but was a biological timepiece of flesh and blood which did not tell the hours. Turned up towards the invisible squirrel, her face looked so pinched and ghost-like that her companion suddenly doubted she was real and put his hand against her face to see if it was flesh.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, flinching.

  ‘It’s no pleasure,’ he replied sharply for the gesture had betrayed him; he thought he did not believe in ghosts.

  Towards midday, he allowed her to rest in a clearing among some fallen stones, once a cottage. A few garden flowers wildly and unnaturally returned to nature scrambled about the fallen masonry, where trees of dark ivy grew. Outside the communities, the order of nature was awry; a bee buzzed above a magic sunflower fully two feet across. A patch of rhubarb had become a plantation of huge, sappy stems holding up a thick roof of worm-eaten leaves.

  ‘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 he
r 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.